Spooky Hollow
by CaitlinJ1021
Summary: Spin-off to "4 Doctors, 12 Companions, What Could Possibly Go Wrong?" The procedural paranormal adventures of Sally Sparrow, conspiracy theorist extraordinaire, and Esther Drummond, the ex-CIA, ex-dead Lightning Girl, as they houseshare and solve mysteries.
1. The Submerged Spectre: Part One

**AN: This is a spin-off fic to _4 Doctors, 9 Companions, What Could Possibly Go Wrong?_ and will not make the remotest sense if you haven't read that or its predecessor, 2 million words total or so. If you try to read this without reading that, it will be so weird and nonsensical you'll probably be angry, asking questions like, "Why is this minor character from one episode sharing a house with a character from _Torchwood_ who died in Series 4? Why is she shooting lightning? Why do they keep mentioning that Clara is a vampire? Why is Clara's surname Ravenwood?" So I would generally not bother unless you're _crazy_ into the paranormal and blondes.**

 _The Submerged Spectre_

 _-Part One-_

Every morning was cold. Each day, Esther Drummond woke up and felt like there was ice crawling on her toes and her face, and after ten minutes of lying, frozen, under her sheets, she would venture out of them to go about her daily routine. She'd always been a routine and schedule kind of girl. She was the sort of person who would devise a detailed itinerary for a night out and would commonly end up distraught when people didn't abide by it because really, she was only trying to help. After that had happened twice, people took the hint and stopped inviting her out on trips anywhere, but she still found solace in day-to-day routines.

So, at half past eight, she dragged herself out of bed and hauled on her dressing gown and slippers. Then she would open the curtains and go to the bathroom and brush her teeth. She would be downstairs making breakfast by quarter to nine, and eating breakfast by nine at the latest, except on Sundays where she would let herself do all of these identical things an hour later. By half past nine, she took a cup of coffee back upstairs and sat at her computer doing her internet-trawling day job for Adam Mitchell. Every hour she made herself more coffee. At twelve on the dot she left to make herself lunch. By one she returned and tried to continue until three, with regular breaks of course, because staring at a computer for that long wasn't exactly healthy. By three, she had a snack and then she let herself choose whether to do two more hours of work (though it wasn't really the most arduous work) or go hang around in the living room with Sally Sparrow. Shamefully, she usually picked the latter, and usually felt like she was cheating Adam Mitchell out of his money, even if he _was_ a multimillionaire. By half past six she was making dinner, and at ten-thirty she showered and went to bed, usually with a drink. Rinse and repeat.

Sally Sparrow thought this was weird, thought it was odd that Esther gave herself these strict rules, didn't quite understand why she enjoyed the sameness of being in bed with all of the lights off by half past eleven in the evening. Esther was just thankful to have a bed, to be able to make the rules for herself instead of having them dictated to her by a clandestine military organisation. Boy, was it a great bed, too. She spent a lot of money on soft furnishings because of the hell the last four years of her life had been, and Esther had a _lot_ of blankets and pillows.

Sally did not go to bed at the same time any night, Esther observed. Sometimes she would get herself away by midnight, but that was only if she'd had a particularly rough few nights of sleeping a handful of hours from any time between five AM and nine AM. Sometimes, Esther would be frying herself bacon for breakfast and Sally would drearily walk into the kitchen to get herself a glass of water before lugging her walking-corpse to bed. Then she'd sleep not nearly for long enough and collapse on the couch to watch paranormal documentaries for hours at a time. If she awoke late enough, Esther would be able to snatch the TV for the majority of the evening to play video games or, god forbid, watch the news. Sally Sparrow never watched the news because she claimed the media lied about anything and everything. While the honesty of certain news outlets was not something Esther was generally willing to entertain, she doubted that _every_ story was falsified.

On top of that, she was phenomenally messy, while Esther was irritatingly clean. Esther liked the washing up to be dried instead of just left damp and soapy on the draining board; Esther liked the cutlery drawer to be organised instead of haphazard with spoons mixing with forks and knives all over the shop; Esther ironed and folded her clothes and Sally just dumped them in a crumpled pile in her attic bedroom. It bothered Esther, but Sally maintained that because it didn't bother her she wouldn't do anything to change her unruly habits. Cleaning was the only thing they ever seemed to argue about, and whenever they _did_ argue nothing was achieved.

On the morning of January 16th, an overcast Saturday, Esther did everything that she would usually do. She opened the curtains to the bleak countryside where everything was too grey and too green but comfortingly samey, and groggily meandered into the bathroom to brush her teeth, finding it empty as usual. Indeed, her day continued the same as every other day, the only variety in the food she consumed and the niche websites she browsed, until she was eating lunch in the chilly kitchen and Sally Sparrow managed to haul herself into the land of the living, finally. To Esther's great surprise, she was dressed like she was going out somewhere. Esther rarely felt the need to get dressed into actual clothes – outside-clothes – and was puzzled by this.

In fact, the very first thing she said was, "Going somewhere?" Normally, she would have said 'good morning' or 'good afternoon', but from twelve to one she didn't think it was either the morning _or_ the afternoon, and she didn't much fancy saying 'good luncheon', or 'good noon' to Sally. So she resolved to be rude.

"Hopefully," Sally said, holding her coat. She draped it over the back of one of their four, mismatched chairs. One of the chairs had a leg that was shorter than the other and wobbled dreadfully. They called this chair Clara's Chair because it was the chair they made Clara Ravenwood sit in when she ever came over, which was more frequent than one might think. Esther liked the variety of company that Clara and her girlfriend (who was there just as often as Clara, and was much less morose) brought, because things could easily get very strange if she had to listen to Sally talk about conspiracies and the supernatural for days on end with no respite.

"Where? You never go anywhere. Except to the store – are you going to the store? We're almost out of eggs," Esther informed.

"Well that's because of the egg crisis," Sally told her matter-of-factly. Esther had heard her mention the 'egg crisis' dozens of times. They were no egg crisis, how could there be an egg crisis on a planet with more chickens than people? _Billions_ of chickens? For some reason, Sally Sparrow had convinced herself the media was covering up a global shortage of eggs. "And besides, there's not exactly a lot to do around here – where do you want me to go apart from the shop? And aren't you supposed to be working right now?"

"It's my lunch break," Esther said, "Clearly," she held up the sandwich she was part way through eating to show Sally. Sally had boiled the kettle, but wasn't making any move to pour herself tea or coffee. "Seriously, where are you going?"

"Can I borrow your car?" Sally asked, and Esther was taken aback.

"Um, no? You're not insured," Esther said, "Why do you want my car?"

"Well, there was this rich Victorian bloke called Whitaker Wright. He was totally a criminal, and he ended up getting convicted for fraud and then taking cyanide and killing himself," Sally Sparrow began, which Esther thought was completely irrelevant and she couldn't understand why she was being told about a some suicidal guy who'd probably been dead for a hundred and fifty years, "He had this massive estate, though, it's called Witley Park now, and it has a huge mansion and three artificial lakes." Sally paused and waited for Esther to say something, but Esther had taken another bite of her ham sandwich and had her mouthful. She just shrugged and looked at Sally expectantly, hoping she would continue and somehow this would be an explanation as to why she wanted Esther's car. Sally sighed, seeming annoyed that Esther wasn't telepathic and didn't know the finer points of British crime history, and took out her phone to show Esther a picture.

"What is that?" Esther squinted at it.

"It's an underwater ballroom," Sally said with an undisguisable note of excitement. To Esther, it just looked like an empty dome with a concrete floor, funny yellow ripples above.

"So what?"

" _So what_? _So_ cool, abandoned buildings are, like, totally my thing. This is exactly the sort of place I take photos of, creepy old hovels," Sally explained. _Wow_ , Esther thought sarcastically, if only there were some way to capture the elation she felt at the prospect of spending time in a 'creepy old hovel.' Sally, she thought, really ought to go become a travel agent.

"But there are already photos of it, I'm looking at a photo of it right now," Esther said, nodding at the phone screen. Sally stared at her like she was missing the point completely and then stuck her phone back in the pocket of her jeans, as though Esther in her unappreciation of derelict squats was unworthy to look at it. Esther thought, shouldn't she find _new_ things to take pictures of? Things people had never seen before? Besides, didn't scenery offer way more opportunities for photography than abandoned old buildings? Abandoned old buildings barely changed, they just decayed. With the minute amount of cleaning Sally ever did, Esther often wondered if she was trying to make _their_ house into an abandoned old building.

"Do you not even want me to attempt to pay my rent?" Sally asked her, annoyed.

"Well it just, it just seems like a very limited landscape," Esther told her, "I mean, how different can all the photos of the underwater ballroom really be? It's not like the time of day will affect it an awful lot."

"Up until a few weeks ago, I was _planning_ on taking photos of the creepy, haunted cottage on the hill," Sally quipped at her, "But you know, it turns out that cottage isn't particularly creepy _or_ haunted." She still did not pour herself a drink with the kettle she had just boiled.

"Depends on your definitions of 'creepy' and 'haunted', doesn't it? She _is_ a vampire," Esther pointed out to Sally, "So, you go to the underwater room then. Have fun."

"Do you want to come?" Sally asked her, just as Esther took another bite of her sandwich, "I mean, since you won't let me drive your car."

"Hang on, you mean, you want _me_ to drive _you_ to the weird, underwater thingy?" Esther asked her incredulously with her mouth full. Sally just looked at her hopefully and Esther swallowed before resuming, "I have things to do! I could clean the bathroom if you weren't here."

"I don't see how me being here means you can't clean the bathroom," Sally argued.

"Because every time I try to clean the bathroom you start saying you need the toilet and you apparently just can't hold in a pee, or something," Esther said, "Sometimes I worry you're incontinent." Sally stared at her with shock and offence. "What!? Well, I do worry! You should probably see a doctor! They _are_ free in this country."

"I am not seeing a doctor about my bladder, Esther, my bladder is fine!" Sally protested, going a little red.

"I'm just concerned, is all."

"Are you gonna drive me or not?"

" _Now_?"

"Yes."

" _Right now_? In the middle of the day?"

" _Yes_!"

"Well… well how far is this… ballroom?" she asked.

"Oh, it's so not that far, at all. It's really close, to be honest," Sally said, smiling, and Esther narrowed her eyes, "It's in Godalming."

"Where's Godalming?"

"Surrey."

"Where's Surrey?"

"Just southwest of London."

" _London_!? Even I know that's, like, a _four hour_ drive! Six hours with all the rest stops we'll need to hit up because of you and your weak bladder," Esther retorted, irked by Sally Sparrow's presumptuousness.

"I'll pay for the petrol. It must be, what? Forty quid?" Sally said when Esther refused to immediately accept. There was no way in hell Esther was driving Sally to the other side of the country just so she could take pictures of some old guy's waterlogged greenhouse.

"You don't have that much money. And you seriously want me to _drive you_? Why don't you have a car, anyway?"

"Because congestion charge always made it pointless buying a car in London, and I used to just walk to the shop until you showed up with your Mini," Sally said, as though Esther having a car somehow meant she had a duty to society to drive people anywhere and everywhere they requested, "I'll pay for the petrol."

"You will not pay for gas, you don't even pay your rent, _I've_ paid your rent the last two weeks," Esther said.

"I'll make a mint off of these pictures. Trust me, Esther," Sally assured her. Esther did not trust her, Esther thought she was just a leeching moocher but she had dimples so she could get away with it, and Esther also didn't think a single penny she ever let Sally Sparrow 'borrow' would _ever_ be paid back to her. Nor did she understand what it meant to 'make a mint.' "I'll split the money with you." Esther felt like saying, _but there won't_ be _any money, will there_? "Four hours is, like, a day trip in America."

"Oh, sure, when you actually travel, but before the Miracle I'd only left D.C. once, and it was just to go to Boston. Virginia to Massachusetts is, like, not even an eight hour drive," Esther said offhandedly.

" _What_? Going to Surrey is _nothing_ then. You know, you could always just insure me to drive your car."

"And that would be _another_ bill you won't pay," Esther said, giving up on her sandwich and dropping the crust down onto the plate.

"You might want to finish that, we have a long drive ahead of us."

"Oh no, we do not."

"Why not? You haven't been anywhere except to the supermarket for over a month."

"I like a quiet life! Risk-free!"

"It's _Surrey_ it's not a _war zone_ , how dangerous do you think it is?" Sally asked her pointedly.

"Why can't you make Clara drive you? Clara has a car. I'm sure she'd _love_ to spend prolonged time with you in an enclosed space," Esther said, and Sally scowled at her.

"I am not spending an entire day of my life on my own with Clara. She might bite me."

"She won't bite you," Esther said, shaking her head a little.

"How would you know? Apparently I smell delicious."

"You're talking to somebody who knows how many times a week you shower – I don't believe that for a second," Esther said snidely.

"Drive me."

"No!"

"Please? It'll be, like, a bonding experience. Like a couples retreat, only, without the couples part. Team-building. C'mon. I'll pay for the petrol," Sally continued to say she would pay for gas, but the more she said it the more Esther was sure she was full of it, "Do you really have anything better to do?"

"Yeah, anything that isn't _team building_ ," Esther said, "And work."

"I'll let you clean the bathroom. I'll let you clean the entire house, and you can go catalogue everything that's in the spare room. Make a list, or something. I know how much you like making lists," Sally said. _Darn_ , Esther thought – lists were her weak point. So was cleaning. Maybe it wouldn't be so bad? And, she really hadn't had a chance to drive the Mini Cooper anywhere at all since it was returned to her, except to the supermarket a few times, just to check she hadn't forgotten how to work a car.

"Can you not set off early tomorrow? It'll be dark when we get there, and dark all the way back."

"You mean you'll drive me?"

"Maybe. Tomorrow. When it's not dark. It'll be dark before five o'clock."

"It being dark is the point," Sally told her firmly, "I'll pay for the-"

"Oh. My. _God_. Fine. _Fine_. I will be your darned driver," Esther said, annoyed, standing up to go and put her plate in the sink where she would force Sally Sparrow to wash it later as penance for this stupid field trip, picking the crust off it and now deciding she would eat it, after all, "But you _will_ pay me back for gas."

"Obviously, I just told you I would. Seriously, I'll make a fortune. _We'll_ make a fortune."

"I highly doubt that," Esther grumbled, "Now stop shadowing me, I'm going to get dressed." And now, Esther realised drearily as she trudged up the stairs, she was no longer just Sally Sparrow's unpaid, live-in housekeeper, nor was she merely her rent money loan shark; she had most likely just become her chauffeur, as well. And boy was she sure this position wasn't going to do anything except impede her for the foreseeable future. _Awesome_.

* * *

The drive down to Godalming was not up there on the list of Esther Drummond's Most Fun Experiences, not at all. For a start, they didn't get there until half past five, and it was pitch black as she was directed by Sally Sparrow to pull into what looked like somebody's private driveway and park up there. It took so long because, as Esther had joked about, they really did have to stop twice so that Sally could go to the toilet. Maybe that wasn't so bad because it meant Esther could buy herself coffee, but she would still have rather stayed at home. Most likely, their dinner was going to consist of stopping at the same places on the way back, one of which had a Burger King. Admittedly, she was kind of looking forward to that.

Well, alright, in truth it wasn't _so_ bad, it was just time consuming and inconvenient. It wasn't like she regarded Sally as bad company, she wasn't, she could just get a little intense about governmental lies and conspiracies sometimes and her presence needed to be diluted with that of others. Of course, if Esther was a more social person, this might not be an issue, but it was because she was not. Sally hadn't talked about any of that _spooky_ stuff for the whole ride down, though, and for that Esther was nothing but grateful.

"Are you sure this place is, like, open?" Esther asked, staring around. Ahead of them was a building that looked like a house sitting on the right side of a large, black gate. On the left of the gate was a wooden door and then a clean, white sign reading _Witley Park_. The Mini's lights flashed when Esther locked it and in the light of them she caught Sally giving her a puzzled look. "What?"

"Strictly speaking, this is private property," Sally told her.

"It's WHAT!?" Esther exclaimed, and Sally hushed her, " _Private property_!? What do you mean 'private property'!?" she hissed angrily, seeing in the twilight Sally getting a flashlight out of her coat pocket. Sally didn't answer and focused more on the flashlight, which barely worked and glowed dimly orange. She hit it on the palm of her hand a few times and it brightened momentarily and then went out.

"Bloody thing…"

"Would you answer me!?"

"I don't even think I have spare batteries…" Sally complained.

"Oh my god, are we trespassing?" Esther asked.

Sally looked at her like she'd only just noticed Esther was even there, and said, "Not yet we're not."

"Holy sh… you can't just _break and enter_! It's illegal, we will be arrested! I'm supposed to be keeping a low profile, not committing crimes!" Esther continued to protest furiously. Of course she had driven for five hours just to be arrested in Surrey. Sally was ignoring her and searching her pockets, until Esther shouted her name quite loudly and heard the echo in the night.

"Shh!" Sally ordered, "We're not breaking and entering! We're just entering! Unless you're clumsier than you seem. It's fine, just climb over the gate."

" _Climb over the gate_!?"

"Or wait in the car! It's not like I _usually_ take people with me when I take photos. They get in the way of my shots," Sally said, and Esther stared at her.

"You have made me drive you to the _middle of nowhere_ for _five hours_ so I can wait in the car for you to break into somebody's fancy garden, take some grainy photos, and then drive all the way back home!?" Esther demanded. Suddenly she was thinking that she should have taken her chances and moved in with Clara Ravenwood instead, even if Clara _was_ a bloodsucking vampire. Esther was painted into a corner – even if she did just sit in the car, something could happen to Sally, and she'd probably still end up being an accessory to a crime. Who knew what the result would be if the cops tried to process her? Likewise, though, she didn't want to break in herself.

"I've never been caught trespassing, it'll be fine. It's statistically unlikely that something will go wrong," Sally assured her.

"That is not how statistics work, Sally! There are… variables! Circumstances!"

"Are you staying here or coming with me?" Sally questioned. The flashlight was utterly broken and Sally had no batteries, and that meant that most likely she would end up in danger. She would probably trip, hurt herself, drown in the lake, _anything_ could happen. That would leave Esther a sitting duck for the accusations of the authorities and disgruntled, rich homeowners, her injured housemate slowly dying of pneumonia in the middle of an unknown forest. She couldn't exactly drive back home and leave Sally Sparrow to her moronic fate, either, wandering aimlessly around in the dark. So did she even have a choice? Of course, she _could_ just sit and wait in the car and hope for the best, but she wasn't that sort of person. No, Esther Drummond was painfully nice and painfully helpful, and after a month of living with her it had become a well-established fact that Sally Sparrow was an idiot. Esther didn't want her own neglect to be the reason Sally ended up dead in a mossy ditch out in Surrey.

"You know what? Fine. You win," Esther gave up. Again. Throughout most of her life she'd always been told she ought to be more assertive, this moment was no exception. She pulled off one of her thin gloves and snatched the flashlight from Sally. Who needed batteries when you had a walking, talking lightning bolt? There was a faint, blue glow through her veins and her skin as she charged the flashlight up, currents of light sucked from her hand into the metal device, until it lit up brightly. To be safe, she passed the flashlight into her still-gloved, non-conductive hand until giving it back to Sally. Sally jumped and nearly dropped it. "What's wrong?"

"Got an electric shock."

"I can't say I'm surprised. It's what you deserve, anyway," Esther remarked. Sally ignored that comment – she had a very irksome case of selective hearing. Generally she would act like Esther wasn't even in the room if she said something Sally didn't like.

"Come on, then," Sally finally said, taking the flashlight and heading towards the imposing metal gates of Witley Park. Esther was convinced that they would be spotted and arrested immediately, so she found herself lurking close by the car for a few more seconds until Sally called, "Coming?" Struggling to get her glove back on Esther begrudgingly followed Sally.

"This won't end well," Esther told her.

"Oh, get over yourself," Sally said, "You're really uptight, has anyone ever told you?"

"I'm not uptight!" Esther argued, watching Sally climb over the gate first of all to see how she could manage it herself. Clearly, Sally was well practiced at the art of breaking into places, because she had a certain finesse about her trespassing, and she was doing it all with a heavy-duty flashlight in one of her fists. Esther had never really climbed over a gate before. "I'm just sensible, okay? And safe."

"So safe you got shot and died?" Sally remarked, dropping down the other side of the gate lightly. Esther scowled at her and got a polite smile in return, "C'mon, climb over. It's not that hard." A lie if she ever heard one, Esther knew about thirty seconds later. It _was_ hard, boy was it hard, because unless she was experiencing a massive adrenaline rush she didn't have the _best_ upper-body strength. And she was short, which didn't help her efforts. "Put your back into it," Sally commented. Esther told her to shut up. For a split second after that, Sally laughed, and that was when Esther fell off and landed awkwardly on the frozen ground.

"Ow."

"Oh my god, are you alright?" Sally immediately tried to help her up, which was more than Esther had come to expect from her. Esther was then more worried about accidentally electrocuting her, but her only exposed skin was on her face, and Sally wasn't really trying to touch her face. _That_ would be weird.

"That wouldn't have happened if you were sensible."

"You mean if _you_ were sensible," Sally said, " _You_ followed _me_. You didn't have to. Could've stayed in the car and listened to the radio. You're okay, though?"

"Yeah. I'm okay," Esther assured her.

"Good, because it would be easier if you didn't break your leg or something while we're trespassing," Sally told her, still smiling. She was one of those adrenaline junkies, or something. Esther didn't understand them, she could be perfectly content to sit in a warm room all day playing video games, she didn't need to go risking her neck for kicks. "Suppose you _are_ clumsier than you seem."

"Lead the way to this stupid ballroom," Esther muttered, brushing dirt off of herself.

"Well, I'm not strictly speaking sure where it is," Sally said, looking around, panning the light of the torch over their surroundings. A driveway and an awful lot of dead trees was all Esther could see. Some murky darkness, probably with a fancy English mansion lurking out of sight, lingered at the edge of their field of vision, "We'll just find the lake. How hard can it be to find a lake?"

"Didn't breaking into places get you into trouble with those aliens before?" Esther questioned a minute later, hovering as close to Sally and the light as she dared. She could probably make her own light if she wanted, but didn't trust her electricity not to latch onto the nearest conductive thing. Maybe she would be lucky and it would find a tree to zap, or maybe it would discover the juicier, more charged target on her left. Not worth the risk of accidentally murdering Sally, she decided. Things were scarcely worth the risk of accidental murder, though.

"I totally saved the world that day," Sally argued, "Like you've never broken in somewhere and got in trouble." Esther faltered, because while she had not had to climb over any fences, she _had_ infiltrated the San Pedro Overflow Camp way back when. And how had _that_ ended, she asked herself? Well, it had ended with her nearly choking a man to death.

"That's Torchwood for you," she said unhappily. Usually, she tried to refrain from answering Sally's questions about her time in Torchwood. She would answer in general terms rather than personal ones, would say what caused it, the bigger picture. Her own experiences she did not discuss. "I don't like it out here."

"It's just some trees, Esther. You're not scared, are you?"

"It's not that, I don't like being away from the central grid. This place is remote. I like power lines."

"When you suck up electricity, do you, you know, taste it?" Sally inquired.

" _Taste it_? No. It's like waking up refreshed from a good night's sleep, just a really fast good night's sleep. Not that you'd know what _that's_ like, I doubt you've ever felt refreshed from sleeping in your whole life," Esther said. Sally didn't enjoy Esther prying into her life like that, though. It was the bladder thing all over again.

"Do you always mollycoddle people like this?" Sally questioned.

"I worry, is that a crime?" Esther retorted sharply, which confused Sally somewhat. She'd been joking, trying to make light conversation, and had clearly not expected Esther to react so negatively to a harmless question about her being oddly overprotective. Maybe she would explain herself later, when they weren't in the back end of beyond looking for a lake and she was warm and maybe had a mug of hot chocolate. Again she thought of the Burger King meal which awaited her on the drive back. Esther spied something. "Hey, that looks like a lake over there, right?"

"I don't know, is it wet?"

"I'm looking for _you_ , on _your_ behalf," Esther argued with Sally's sarcasm, which never went well in her experience. The most sarcastic people always tended to be the most opinionated, too. Nevertheless, she looked where Esther pointed, through the black trees, and the torch beam rippled across a body of water. They headed towards it, though Esther didn't like being close to water any more than she liked being disconnected from the national grid.

The forest abruptly ended and gave way to the huge lake, whose waters were so bleak and muddy Esther wondered if anything was even alive inside. Leeches, perhaps, or something just as parasitic and grim. Around the entire lake ran a grey, stone wall, not even a foot high, which was good for Esther because it made it harder for her to accidentally wade in puddles. If she and Sally were to step in a puddle at the same time they might as well sign a suicide pact. On a nice, summer's day, it might be a nice view, a good place for a picnic, leaning against the trees with the crisp water spreading out ahead, all of that rural scenery people romanticised so much. But it was the middle of January and they were half an hour past sunset, civil twilight was ended so they were just in the dark, committing a crime.

"I sure as hell don't see any ballroom."

"Did you miss the part where I said it was _underwater_?" Sally countered, then she pointed, "Do you see that statue?" Esther squinted for a second until she could semi see a shadow.

"I guess?"

"The statue is built on top of it."

" _Oh_ ," Esther said, staring at it. Then she heard Sally begin to walk off, and she followed on, having nothing else to do. If the scenery were visible and a little less creepy, she might have stayed to look at it, but there was little point that evening. "What's this entrance, then? How did you get in?"

"There's a tunnel," Sally said.

"A hidden one? Don't tell me we have to find a hidden tunnel?"

"It's got a massive, wooden door, I saw in photos. Can't miss it," Sally assured her. Again, Esther wondered why in the world Sally was taking more photos when the photos already existed. Creative types were so strange sometimes.

"You really should have brought Clara. I'm sure she would appreciate all of this more."

"I told you, I'm not spending time in a confined space with her," Sally repeated herself, "You know what vampires are like about water, anyway. She was just saying the other week that she can't take baths anymore, she's as bad as you. What is it with the undead and not bathing?"

"You're a hypocrite. And I shower every day, you know. Showering is better for the environment _and_ the water bill."

"Well _not_ showering is _even better_ for the environment and the water bill. Maybe I'll start standing out in the rain to wash. I'll erect an outhouse in the garden and take the roof off – nature's own shower," Sally said.

"Outhouses aren't natural. And god, I didn't think it was possible for you to become _even more_ of a freeloader, but you really will do anything to avoid paying for things, won't you?" Esther jibed.

"Ah-ha," Sally changed the subject away from her bad habits and personality flaws, and the flashlight was illuminating a heavy, oak door set into a mud embankment that rose up like a small fell a little way away from the icy lake, " _That's_ the way in."

"And what're you gonna do if it's locked?" Esther questioned.

"It doesn't even _have_ a lock, look. I figure the front gates are designed to keep people out. Besides, there's not anything down there worth protecting," Sally shrugged, walking straight up to it. Then she tripped over on something and swore. Initially, Esther figured it was only a tree root or something else inconsequential, until Sally stooped down to examine what had caused her to stumble and the light found something out of place.

"Is that a shoe?" Esther frowned. Sally picked it up – it _was_ a shoe. A white sneaker. Well, not white anymore, it was coated in mud, but once it had been white.

"It's a girl's trainer," Sally said, holding it up in front of her, "Weird."

"I've never understood how people lose shoes, and just one of them," Esther said, watching Sally put it back down in the dirt. There wasn't much else they could do with it.

"Quicksand. Sucks it up one place and spits it out another," Sally told her.

"Not how quicksand works."

"Maybe she was running from something," Sally said, and Esther stared at her flatly, but she was amusing herself now, "And lost her shoe escaping. A monster out here in the woods." She held the flashlight under her chin like kids did when they told ghost stories, but Esther wasn't particularly scared _or_ impressed.

"Sure thing, Spooky Sally," Esther said, and Sally's smile – which had looked thoroughly twisted in the light coming from underneath her face – vanished.

"Hanging out in the woods at night is pretty spooky as well you know, Esther," Sally said, going to try and heave open the door.

"You made me come here!"

"Potato-potahto," Sally shrugged, and Esther gave up, muttering to herself, " _Nobody says 'potahto,'_ " and helped her drag the door open. It was heavy and hinged and took the pair of them a minute or two to get it wide enough to squeeze in. Esther wasn't convinced it even opened all the way. If this was a place meant for the upper class friends of a rich gentleman, it wasn't the most dignified of entrances. What if it was raining? They would traipse about in the dirty grounds and haul open this massive door? Then they'd have to go through sinister tunnels, sinister tunnels which Esther now saw. Well, tunnel. But she supposed there would be more.

"This looks… safe…" Esther said pitifully, crossing her arms tightly around herself.

"It's fine, come on," Sally said, going ahead anyway. In her life she had always followed other people, and it didn't seem her afterlife was lining up to be any different. "On the topic of Clara, though, she might not have even been able to climb over the gate."

"Why?"

"Well, she has to be invited in, doesn't she? You remember two weeks ago when it was raining and she had to stay stood outside for five minutes before either of us realised," Sally said, "Not that she needed to come in, she was only round to borrow sugar."

"You could never be arrested for illegally trespassing if you were a vampire. There could be CCTV, you know."

"In a forest? Not likely. And besides, you _would_ know, wouldn't you?" Sally pointed out. Annoyingly enough, that was true. Esther _would_ know. But she was distracted from that argument by the fact they went through the snaking tunnel, which followed the same course as the artificial embankment the door was pressed into and curved, and it ended above a winding, spiral staircase. It was built into a circular column of a room and above, when Sally shone the light, was a strange roof that bore a grid pattern.

"This is _creeeepy_ ," Esther half-sang, peering around.

"That's the _poooint_ ," Sally mimicked her, heading down the metal stairs without a care in the world. In the darkness, all Esther could see was dirty old walls and grime. Maybe the surfaces around them had once been white, porcelain or something, but they were cracked and marred with age and damp filth. Esther wouldn't be surprised to see mould, but she wasn't too good at separating mould from mud in the poor lighting.

"Clara would never get in the way of your photos, would she?" Esther said, "You know, because she has no image? Unless that meant she'd be less likely to come with you; probably reminds her of everything she's lost."

"So does walking past a window," Sally commented. At the foot of the short spiral staircase was a largish room, over twice the size of their sitting room, and then nearby was a straight hallway in a very odd shape. It was a bit like an egg, but an egg with a pointy top and a slightly flattened bottom to make a level surface to walk on. So not really so much like an egg, but Esther couldn't think of anything else to liken it to. A sunflower seed with one tip cut off? It was weird, was what it was, and had the same dirty white texture as everything else did. To Esther's relief, there weren't any puddles or leaks.

"It would be cool if this was in the sea. You know, there's this video game where this rich objectivist builds a whole city underwater. Actually, Adam Mitchell told me there's an alternate universe where that place is real."

"Sounds like a golden photo opportunity."

"You wouldn't be saying that if you ever played the darn thing…" Esther mumbled. Last thing she wanted was Sally Sparrow getting ideas in her head about paying a visit to Rapture.

If Esther were to be truthful and speak in terms of scenery only, she would much rather have been down in Rapture. In its fictional heyday, and even in its nightmarish end state, it was a damn sight grander than this underwater ballroom. 'Underwater ballroom,' she thought, was being generous. Despite seeing photographs earlier, she had still been expecting something more reminiscent of a fish tank, or like the dome from _The Simpsons Movie_ , a sleek bowl of glass with no markings in it at all. That was not what she got, however. It was a dome, sure, and in the daytime when you could see the light dappling the green surface of the lake it was probably very enchanting, but its charm was lost by the grid pattern of the windows. The panes of glass themselves were maybe a foot by a foot each, and set into white reinforcements. Even if the day above was bright, sunny and cloudless, she still doubted that anything much would be visible inthe limited, dreary view. Along with that major anti-climax, it was also _freezing_. The bottom of a lake in January felt to Esther like the arctic circle.

"H- _holy_ cow, it is _cold_ down here," she shivered, crossing her arms tightly.

"Nah, it's fine," Sally said absently, taking her camera out of the large pockets of her coat.

"I can see my breath. And your breath, too."

"Just stay out of the way of the camera and we'll be out of here in no time at all," she said.

"Maybe I _should_ have stayed in the car…" Esther sighed. She wandered over to lean on the wall by the entrance, behind Sally and out of way. Then she went about doing what she usually did when she was bored and away from greater civilisation – played with her powers. Not that her sliding off her left glove and conjuring up tiny lightning bolts in the palm of her hand went unnoticed for long. The thing was, it was incredibly dark in that ballroom, no moonlight seeping through the heavy waters, and only Sally's torch for light. So the bright blue glow of the electricity crackling down Esther's hand, floating above her skin but following a vague, zigzagging pattern of her shimmering veins, captivated Sally Sparrow almost immediately.

For a split second, the room had been dancing with sapphire shadows. As soon as Esther caught Sally staring at her, though, she clenched her fist and the light vanished. It seemed much darker by comparison then, even with the flashlight.

"No! Don't stop," Sally pleaded, "That's so cool." She shone the flashlight in Esther's face, and Esther flinched.

"Get that outta here," she said, squinting.

"Sorry."

"It's dangerous," Esther told her.

"Do it again!" she asked, like a child who had just seen a magic trick. She was beaming, too.

"No!"

"Oh, go on. _Please_. I'll do the washing up for a week."

"No you won't," Esther said. More empty promises, like the gas money, the rent money, _all_ the money Esther had ever leant her. Now she was moving on to household chores – if Sally couldn't be bothered doing her _own_ chores, she definitely wasn't going to start doing Esther's, even if Esther _did_ show off for her.

"You know, these photos aren't all that great because the lighting is awful."

"Serves you right for coming at night, then, doesn't it?" Esther remarked, "Should have set off early."

"I didn't really think about the fact it would be so dark."

"You should have. You can't even see the water outside. What would be cool would be if you had lights at the bottom of the lake," Esther told her, " _That_ would probably get you some unique photos."

"I know – go back outside and electrify the water," she said, like she had had an epiphany. A terrible epiphany, Esther thought.

"Because that _totally_ wouldn't attract attention of the people whose property were breaking into, or anything, would it?" she said sardonically.

"Put on a lightshow."

" _What_? No way."

"Yes way! It would make the photos totally original. Nobody else has the Lightning Girl, do they?" Sally tried to coax her. She really, _really_ did not like the fact she was repeatedly bending to the wishes of Sally Sparrow; paying her way, driving her around, sneaking onto private property, Esther was proud of none of them. She kept finding herself painted into a corner, though, seemingly with little choice. While she didn't want to reduce herself to a sideshow attraction, the mysterious, blue illuminations of her lightning abilities really would make for some interesting shots. Her only real reason not to use her powers – since there was nobody else around and making pretty lights was practically risk-free – was stubbornness. She didn't want to keep giving in, but she also didn't want to be annoyed to death by Sally (and she already knew from experience that Sally was pretty darn good at being annoying when she really put her mind to it.)

"God, alright," she relented, making noises of the utmost frustratioin as she took off her other glove, too. Sally stared in awe as she made her arms into a circuit, her hands glowing, electricity zipping through the air between her hands. The shadows of the underwater ballroom danced as the light flickered and crackled, and there was a noise akin to sparks to go along with it. "Are you gonna take your photos, then?"

"Oh, right. Yep. I'll do that," Sally had grown distracted, but lifted her camera back up and turned away from Esther, who amused herself with the electricity not unlike somebody playing catch with themselves, tossing a baseball back and forth absentmindedly. "Does that not hurt? Does it, like, drain you?"

"No, all the electricity comes back to me. If you pushed me into the lake – now _that_ would drain me. Kill me straight away. Don't push me in the lake," Esther said.

"Well that's just ruined my plans for the rest of the evening – how'd you know I was planning to push you into the lake?" she joked.

"Very funny."

"I don't make a habit of attempted murder, you're more than safe, Esther."

"Not killing me is the least you can do after everything I've helped you with today. This is a really one-sided relationship we have going on, you know."

"Ooh, 'relationship', I wouldn't've thought that was a word I'd ever hear come out of _your_ mouth."

"As long as you keep things platonic."

"I'll try my best," Sally assured her sarcastically.

"I'm being serious, you know. All you do is take, take, take."

"And in return you get my charming company! I think it's a great deal. These photos are gonna be good, by the way."

"Your 'charming' company?" Esther questioned wryly.

Sally turned back to face her and raised an eyebrow, "Are you saying I'm not charming?"

"You must be plenty charming if you keep coaxing me into wandering around creepy…"

It was pale and smooth with the same milky sheen as a pearl, and when she saw it and its soft, human-esque features pressing against the mottled glass of the ballroom, she lost her sentence completely. Bulbous, fishy eyes set into an opalescent face seemed to stare right at Esther, but she saw it for only a moment before she made a noise of fear, jumped, and lost her lightning. Sparks of it shot to the floor and burned the ground and Sally jumped as well. Then it was too dark to see much.

"What? What happened?" Sally asked her urgently, fumbling to pick up the flashlight from the ground. Esther didn't say anything, she tried to get her bearings and lifted up one hand. The bright blue light returned to her fingertips, crackling and buzzing, but it illuminated no face in the glass panel this time. "Esther? Esther, are you alright?" She hardly heard Sally's words until she hit her in the shoulder.

"Ow!" Esther protested.

"What was that?" Sally asked her. Now what to say? This was Sally Sparrow she was with, _Spooky_ Sally Sparrow, who consumed paranormal documentaries like an alcoholic consumed booze.

"I don't… I don't know, I…" she fumbled, her eyes fixed rigidly on that one pane of glass. She grabbed the flashlight out of Sally's hands, the bulb intensifying at her charged touch, and shone it straight at the glass. It didn't do a lot of good, though, just reflected dimly back into the room.

"Did you see something?" Sally puzzled, following Esther's gaze. Her first thought was that it had been a trick of the mind, a terrified, uneasy mind, but how could that be true when she had neither been terrified nor uneasy? Cold, yes. Anxious about them being caught, yes. But _scared_? Scared of anything… anything… _weird_? She didn't have those sorts of phobias – what sort of subconscious would conjure up something like that? To what purpose She was deathly afraid of moths, but she didn't see any of _those_ flapping about in the iridescent cove. "Esther?" Sally asked again, softly, with a note of worry Esther was surprised to realise was genuine. She finally looked away from the glass to see Sally's concerned eyes, but she looked back at the glass again quickly. What if it reappeared? Whatever 'it' was?

"I don't know," she said again.

"You must have seen something, you're pretty spooked," Sally said. Esther didn't comment on the irony of Spooky Sally saying _she_ was the one who was spooked.

"I don't know what I saw."

"What did it look like?" she enticed. And here was the dilemma; Sally would, without a doubt, believe anything Esther told her she had seen. She would believe it, endorse it, help it along as it festered in her doubts and her imagination, and as comforting as Sally's blind faith in the existence of anything remotely supernatural was, it also struck Esther as a little dangerous.

"A face," Esther finally answered honestly, "Like, I don't know, a person. Outside."

"Outside? In the lake, you mean?"

"Yeah, in the lake." Sally approached the pane of glass where Esther had been shining the flashlight. "Well don't go over there! It might not be… safe. Or something."

"Whatever it is, it's outside."

"We should leave," Esther said, and Sally ignored her and reached up as though to touch the glass, "Sally, did you hear me? _We should leave_. Now. Seriously." Sally clenched her fist before she touched the window and did not, in the end. Good, Esther thought. "There's something weird about this place."

"Weird how?" Sally asked her quickly.

"I don't know, can't you feel it? I have goosebumps, and I'm cold, and… and can we just leave? Please? You got your photos. You got loads. I want to go home."

"Yeah. Yeah, sure," Sally stepped away from the wall, but she now appeared to be thinking about something that was keeping her from focusing entirely on the present, "Home. We can stop at that Burger King you said you wanted on the way back." Again, Esther found herself legitimately surprised that Sally had listened to her and remembered something she had said. Maybe she wasn't as self-centred as Esther initially thought? Still, she was grateful to be allowed to leave. She would have left and gone back to the car on her own, had she not been suddenly very wary about venturing the grounds of Witley Park alone…

* * *

Headlights guiding invisible cars along the freeway drifted brightly in the darkness. Out of the window of the service station they were stopped at, Esther could see little else aside from these mechanical fireflies. The night was too cloudy to make out much of the moon, and the bright interior meant mainly she was looking back at her own harrowed reflection. The Esther in the glass didn't look like she was having a good day, but as she stared straight into her own translucent eyes she saw mirrored the memory of that pearly, bloated face.

Sally Sparrow kicked her in the shin underneath their table.

"What was that for!?"

"I was talking to you!" Sally defended her actions, "You're being weird, I'm worried."

"Well maybe you shouldn't kick me! That's totally gonna bruise!" Esther protested, lifting up her feet and sitting cross-legged on her chair so that Sally would have to go to more effort if she wanted to attack her again. Her eyes drifted back towards the window.

" _Esther_."

"What?"

"I'm trying to talk to you," Sally reiterated.

"About what?"

"About what you saw."

"Trick of the light."

"Was it, though?" Sally asked seriously, with some concern, "You've been talking about this junk food all day, and you've barely touched it, come on. Talk to me." That was true, she had a whole tray of food in front of her. Sally had been picking at Esther's fries for the best part of ten minutes now, she noticed. She'd only had two bites of her burger, she was very tired and not all that hungry.

"I've drunk my milkshake," Esther said defensively, "That's enough for me."

"You ought to eat something proper."

"Says you."

"Hey, I know from my experience of making terrible life choices exactly what terrible life choices I should stop _other_ people from making. So, eat something," Sally said. Her concern was touching.

"I didn't know you cared."

"Of course I care, you keep paying my rent for me," she joked, "But, really."

"It wasn't anything, I imagined it."

"If you really believed that, you wouldn't be so scared," Sally said seriously. A surprisingly accurate observation. Just that morning, Esther thought she had everything about Sally Sparrow figured out, she was just one of those conspiracy nuts, a _selfish_ conspiracy nut at that, but if she was really so single-minded and selfish, she wouldn't be so bothered about Esther.

"Whatever you want me to say, I'm not going to," Esther continued with her closemindedness, "Why don't _you_ talk about it, if you're so desperate, huh?"

"You know when you have a lot of ideas, and you can't really formulate them coherently?"

"I guess."

"Well… well look, a face? In a lake? Looking in? A _human_ face? There's three things it could be: a mermaid, a dead body, or a ghost," Sally told her. There it was, 'ghost', the word Esther knew she'd been _dying_ to get out in the open for the last two hours they'd been driving (it was just past seven o'clock and they were in the thick of the winter night already.)

"Ghosts? Ghosts do not exist."

"Oh, come on, Esther," Sally whispered, leaning across the table towards her, " _You_ stopped the Miracle. Everybody on Earth just stopped dying. And you were brought back to life and you've travelled through time with aliens, why do you draw the line at ghosts? They exist. You can prove it."

"If you could prove ghosts existed, everybody would know about them, Sally."

"It's not my fault that 'everybody' is too blind to notice. Ten years ago, they used to say that people who claimed to see spaceships were crazy, as well. For christ's sake, we _do_ live ten minutes away from a vampire," Sally told her. She sounded like a lunatic, but everything she said was, Esther hated to admit, a very good point. There was just something in her that didn't want to give Sally Sparrow the satisfaction of being right about something, especially something so… spooky. But if she accepted what Sally believed, she didn't think she would be the recipient of any obnoxious I-told-you-sos.

"So is that place… is it haunted?"

"Not to my knowledge," Sally told her, "People die all the time, though." Esther stayed quiet. "What, exactly, was it? This face, what did it look like? Boy, girl? Young, old?"

"It was just for a second. But it looked… dead. Kind of swollen. I don't really know, I don't want to talk about it, Sally," she said quietly, sighing. She didn't like the idea of the dead roaming the Earth, even if, technically, _she_ was dead and roaming the Earth. She was just much more palpable than your average phantom, and she was doing her roaming in a Mini Cooper rather than some in-between limbo realm. "What do you mean, you can 'prove it'?"

"I mean that it's scientifically proven that spirits exist, they still walk through the land of the living."

"Scientifically proven by whom?"

"The smartest girl in the universe, who do you think? Your fiancée." Esther couldn't even muster the motivation to cast Sally a disapproving look, she just sighed and slouched a little, debated trying to take another bite of her burger, but it was probably cold by now. She supposed they had best be off soon.

"I might cross the bridge over the freeway to get coffee before we leave," Esther changed the subject. There was a Costa on the other side of the road, and it was enticing her now she was oddly exhausted.

"It's a motorway, I think you'll find," Sally corrected her.

"Whatever it is, I want coffee."

"Do you want to leave now, then? Because I need the toilet."

"Of _course_ you need the toilet…" Esther grumbled, but she uncrossed her legs and stood up, stumbling a little because her feet had been going numb from trying to keep her shins out of the range of Sally's boots. "Go to the bathroom, then I'll get coffee. Do you want anything?"

"I mean, if you're _offering_ ," Sally began, "Then I'll have hot chocolate."

"Then would you…" Esther yawned mid-sentence and trailed off, but it was quite an impressive yawn and her eyes were marred with tired when she stopped and resumed talking, "Would you clear these trays?"

"Uh, sure… are you alright? You seem tired. _Really_ tired."

"I'll be fine," Esther assured her.

"I could always drive."

"Not a chance," Esther said, walking off, "I'll just meet you back at the car in ten minutes, okay?" She left Sally in the Burger King about the same time a rowdy family of five came in with the three kids begging for candy and to play on the racing games in the arcade. She saw this as a narrow escape.

In the harsh, clinical lights of the rest stop, with food and people and electricity and Sally for pleasant company, most of the lingering feeling of fear she'd dragged out of Witley Park with her had dissipated. As she climbed the stairs into the chilly, enclosed bridge over what Sally called a motorway, however, that feeling came back. The goosebumps returned, as did an odd sensation on her head like when you rubbed a balloon on your hair and it became riddled with static. She crossed her arms tightly around herself and hunched over a little, picking up her pace as she crossed, alone, watching the cars glide along below on what she still thought of as the wrong side of the road.

At least she returned to civilisation relatively quickly, and there was quite the conglomeration of people in the coffee shop. They were teenagers off a coach on some school trip, just arrived. Were banned by their teachers from crossing over the bridge. She had to wait a good few minutes to order, and yawned a couple more times in the process. She heard a few unwanted comments from these sixteen year old Brits about the US election, too, but she tried to ignore them. It didn't matter to her anymore - the last time she checked, dead girls weren't eligible to vote, and she lived on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean now.

Honestly, she felt like she might pass out. Within ten minutes she was carrying her coffee, the most caffeinated drink she could spy on the menu, and Sally's hot chocolate back through the empty bridge. She was even more uneasy this time than the first time, but those feelings she suspected were exacerbated by the dread of crossing again she'd built up in her mind waiting in line for drinks. She would have pushed in, but she'd learnt the hard way that people in the United Kingdom weren't the most fond of queue-bargers. That fateful day in Sainsbury's, people had looked at her as though she was a murderer.

Halfway through the short journey she stopped and kind of staggered back as she was hit abruptly with another yawn. She didn't understand why she was so tired, but found herself leaning against the glass with her eyes closed, lids sickeningly heavy. What she wouldn't give just to go to sleep right then, even though she'd not even been awake for twelve hours yet. Driving never usually exhausted her so much.

Before she could succumb to her groggy brain she got a grip of herself, noticed the cold winter air again, and opened her eyes. And Esther nearly screamed. She most definitely made some kind of noise, one of sheer terror, a great fear about level with the time Captain Jack Harkness had pushed her out of a building into a fountain to escape from a suicide bomber, because there it was. The face. And more. It was reflected right there in the dark glass, like the thing was standing next to her, a short, youngish figure. Those same swollen eyes, bloated flesh, sagging clothes. It was white as the moon, it nearly glowed, and it met her eyes, standing directly next to her, sopping wet.

Immediately she looked to her left, trying to find it, a tangible person to grab and to question, _anything_ to prove she wasn't insane. She backed away towards the side of the rest stop with the Burger King and the car, but there was nothing. In the glass, all she saw was the cars again. The tunnel was empty. But she had _felt_ it, and she was terrified. It felt like she had been doused with icy water all over, numbing her skin, but if she had been she would be dead. At the very least, she would be convulsing and conducting lightning a large deal. She was dry, and she was alone.

She nearly ran out of there, panting, still carrying their drinks. Most likely she looked like a madwoman as she sprinted out of the services towards the blue car and a waiting Sally Sparrow. Sally was looking at her phone, but nearly dropped it on the ground when she saw Esther coming towards her in the state she was in.

"Are you alright?" Sally asked. Her breath clouded in the freezing outdoors. Esther found she couldn't speak. "Esther? Holy… what happened? … Give me those." She took the drinks right out of Esther's hands and sat them on the car roof instead.

"I saw it," Esther told her, meeting her gaze.

"The face?" She nodded. "Where? In there?"

" _Yes_ , in there, in the bridge, I saw its reflection in the window, like it was next to me. Like… like _she_ was next to me. I think." Sally drank in every word she said. "If… if that's a ghost, then… but why is it _here_? I don't…" She closed her eyes for a brief second. It felt like a brief second, anyway, but when she opened her eyes it was because she banged on something hard and somebody shook her.

"Careful there," Sally cautioned, holding her shoulders to steady her.

"What?"

"Did you just fall asleep? On your feet?" Sally asked. In response, Esther yawned. "I think you should give me the car keys and let me drive."

"No!"

"Jesus, Esther, you're scared out of your mind and you just fell asleep! If you fall asleep for just a second at the wheel, we could crash. You're in a state, I'm not letting you drive. I _do_ have my driver's license on me, you know," Sally told her.

"You're not on the insurance."

"And you think if we both die in a car accident the insurance will make much of a difference?" Sally pointed out, "I'm either driving this car home, or we're staying in the Premier Inn over there. And I once got food poisoning from a Premier Inn, so I'd rather not." It didn't take much more than a threat of a car crash to make Esther surrender her keys, the old Pacman ghost keychain hanging off them. How bittersweet the token from her sister suddenly looked. "Thank you." Sally then opened the right-side door and was confused for a second.

"The car's American, remember?" Esther reminded her, picking the drinks back up and waiting for Sally to move.

"Right. Yep. Other side. Got you now," she said. Esther wondered if handing the car keys over was a bad idea, until she nearly nodded off again. How she was managing to nearly fall asleep on a January evening when she might as well be in an igloo, in a loud, public place, she didn't know. It didn't seem to be a normal sort of tired, and it seemed to be growing worse.

The coffee did not help. She was hell-bent on staying awake to monitor Sally's driving, which was not nearly so bad as she assumed once they got going, so she sat with her coffee held between her cold hands trying to remain conscious, but it barely worked. For a few minutes, she thought the caffeine was taking effect, that she would stay up until they got back to home, but it wasn't meant to be. In spite of the mystery she was suddenly entangled in, Esther Drummond could not force herself to stay awake. By nodding off after just fifteen minutes in the car she had involuntarily placed in Sally Sparrow more trust than she ever had before, hoping she would get them home with neither of them dying.


	2. The Submerged Spectre: Part Two

_The Submerged Spectre_

 _-Part Two-_

Esther had never had a hangover. When she was young enough to still see the appeal in drinking excessively, she was too young to suffer many of the ill effects. That stage of her life had lasted scarcely a few months, though, before she had had an epiphany about the dangers of alcohol and liver cancer. So, before she was barely even into the throngs of adulthood, she had put away the idea of drinking for good. As a result, she'd never woken up with a throbbing headache on a Sunday morning with her face stuck to a toilet seat. While, presently, the toilet seat was not a part of her situation, the headache part and the Sunday part _were_ , and she thought that if she _did_ choose to drink, this was what a hangover would feel like.

It was as though her brain had been torn out of her skull and squeezed like a sponge until it was as shrivelled as a prune, then stuck straight back in her head where pain made it swell up again ferociously and bleed. Without a doubt, it was one of the worst headaches she had experienced in her entire life. It was almost as bad as getting shot, or when she had appendicitis. It was actually _worse_ than when she'd broken ankle when she was fourteen.

She didn't know how long she had slept for, but she had been in and out of varying states of dreariness and dreaminess for perhaps hours. There was a solid block of painful black in her memory, which she supposed was sleeping, and then perhaps a dozen subsequent flickers of aching consciousness, until she finally reached the point of no return where she simply could not sleep any longer. Her headache was so jarring that for the longest while she didn't even realise that she was lying in a bed and she had definitely fallen asleep in a car. That put the idea into her head that she was suffering major cranial trauma because Sally Sparrow had crashed. In the end, that fear was all it took for her to force herself to open her eyes and genuinely look around.

It wasn't a hospital, to her great relief. It was her bedroom, her plain little bedroom, her single bed pressed into the corner against the wall, the curtains drawn tightly over the window opposite, her huge computer sitting nearby. There was the Syphon 2.0, glowing blue and pulsing silently. She was caught off-guard by the sunlight pouring in through the curtains though. It wasn't normally so bright outside when she woke up. What time had she gone to sleep? Seven? She couldn't possibly have slept in – could she?

When she discovered she was still fully dressed, complete with her shoes still on her feet, she was a little surprised, and she felt sort of disgusting. Who slept in their clothes, apart from drunkards and junkies? Certainly not her, she'd _never_ fallen asleep with all of her clothes still on. Well, not until now, at least. That meant she had the extra task on her hands of trying to crawl into some pyjamas before she braved the downstairs in search of painkillers and Sally. Twice during the simple process of merely getting changed – a process which she had gone through tens of thousands of times – she had to sit down on the edge of the bed to regain her bearings.

Esther trudged like an invalid down the staircase with her dressing gown and her slippers on, probably looking a mess because she hadn't washed yesterday's makeup from her face. She needed a shower, but she didn't know if she had it in her to stand up for more than thirty seconds at a time. She'd _love_ a bath, but she could not have baths without electrocution playing a major role.

When she came into the sitting room, she found Sally Sparrow awake and slouching across the couch, as usual. But when she saw Esther, she sat up, looking quite worried. A messy notebook with papers sticking out of it fell onto the floor, which they both ignored, and Sally put a mug of what looked like cold coffee down next to her.

"How are you feeling?" she asked. Again with the concern Esther wasn't used to. She was beginning to think it wasn't just concern from _Sally_ which proved unsettling, it was concern for her in general. With Sarah so ill, Esther always found that she was the one being concerned, not the one to whom the worry was directed towards. It took her by surprise, and she was already so sick-feeling anyway. She didn't even attempt to make it to the armchair in the far corner to sit down, and didn't attempt to answer Sally Sparrow until she was no longer on her feet. She slumped down, nearly _fell_ down, onto the sofa, Sally moving her feet to accommodate for the smaller space she was now resigned to. Unless she moved to sit in the chair, of course, which sat morose with worn-down reddish leather in the corner. It was a comfy chair, but Esther couldn't shake the worry that in the summer little critters might creep out of it and make her life an itchy misery. "Esther?"

"Like hell," Esther finally answered. Sally was watching her as though she was studying her. It was just as unnerving as being worried about. "Where did I fall asleep?"

"In the car, while I was driving. I didn't crash, by the way. Or get pulled over," Sally told her. That was not an attempt to genuinely impress Esther, it was said with a type of sarcasm that clearly meant Sally thought she was being treated as a child, so perhaps it was bad that Esther was genuinely impressed.

"So how'd I get in bed?" Esther frowned. Sally probably couldn't tell that she was making a point to frown, because her face was already so scrunched up against the pain of her headache. It was like her skull was being drilled into from a dozen different angles, or crushed by a hydraulic press.

"I carried you," Sally said firmly. There was a brief moment where Esther just stared at her and Sally stared back with a look of utter seriousness. Then Sally felt like the effect had been lost and admitted, "That was a joke. You might be short, but if I hadn't managed to wake you up for all of fifteen seconds, I'd've left you in the car."

"You're not exactly tall yourself."

"All the more reason to leave you out there. And out there is _freezing_ , it snowed last night after we got back," Sally said, and Esther's eyes widened. She hadn't seen snow for _years_ , not since before she died. Suddenly, the excitement of a child was thwarting the boiling hot pain in her head, and she got to her feet and pulled the curtains back.

"Why do you never open the curtains? You have to let light into the room, you know," Esther told her.

"You're not my mother, Esther. And why? I don't like the light."

"You'd be a great vampire if you could convince Clara to bite you," Esther told me.

"If I hang around with her enough I'm sure she would," Sally said, "She'd probably enjoy it, too." She probably would, Esther thought to herself. Sally _would_ be a good vampire, but Esther wondered where she would get her blood. As appetising as Esther apparently smelled to coffin-dwellers, she was often glad that her electrified skin made it impossible for them to do her much harm.

She stared out of the misty window at the snow-laden ground outside. The road they lived on was scarcely driven over and had but a few tyre marks cutting through the snow. There were a good few inches of it, as well, and she suddenly got the idea in her head to build a snowman. Or have a snowball fight. _Or_ make snow angels. Sally was not the type to go building snowmen into adulthood, though, and building a snowman all on her own would ruin the fun of it. And if they had a snowball fight, Esther was sure Sally would play dirty. Then the sunlight shining off the snow got too much for her, and she flinched away from it and closed the curtains. It was like she had a migraine, and she wanted to be in a dark room with as few stimuli as possible. She meandered over to the armchair when she sat down this time.

"What time is it?"

"About eleven," Sally answered, "You've been asleep for fifteen hours."

" _Fifteen hours_!?" Esther exclaimed, but her own exclamation made her head throb, "I don't think I've ever slept for fifteen hours before in my life. I must have caught something in those woods, I guess. Hey, you wouldn't mind making me a coffee, would you?"

"Oh, sure. Won't be a minute." Sally left the room, leaving Esther to curl up in the chair and rub her temples. She didn't understand why she was in so much pain – could she be ill? What kind of crazy disease could she have contracted in rural Surrey? Why was Sally unaffected?

Sally seemed oddly distant that morning, and kept looking at Esther like she was studying her. From all her time trapped in the Tower of London with scientists prodding and poking her to try and understand why it was she shot lightning bolts from her palms, she'd gotten pretty good at identifying those looks of observation and curiosity people threw her way. In spite of it all, Esther was still grateful for the coffee she received a few minutes later.

"You drink a lot of coffee, you know," Sally remarked.

" _You_ drink a lot of _tea_ ," Esther said. She liked tea, but could she drink the amount of tea that Sally Sparrow did? More than eight cups a day? And not get bored of it? No. Variety was the spice of life; she always liked that idiom. "There's not a lot to drink here except coffee, or milk. I can't stand any of that weird fruit juice you get."

"What fruit juice?" Sally frowned.

"The juice that you sometimes drink that's, like, _extreme_ fruit. That orange stuff that's so strong it gives me a headache," Esther said, and Sally stared at her.

"Wait – you mean the squash? You know you dilute it with water first? Don't you have cordial in America?" Sometimes, Sally looked at Esther as though she were an alien, which was a little ironic.

"I guess not." Esther drank some of her coffee, glad for the caffeine. She didn't know if it was really helping her headache, though. It still felt like her brain was a dry sponge. Sally watched her for a second, then paused and went to look for something. She fumbled around on the sofa, confused, until spying that old notebook that had dropped to the floor at her feet earlier.

Picking it up, she asked Esther, "So, why do you think you passed out last night?"

"I don't know, I figure I'm just sick," Esther told her.

"Right…" Sally mused, watching her again. She watched her until Esther glared very deliberately, and she went to sift through her notebook. It was one of many notebooks Esther had seen at a glance the few times she'd actually ventured into Sally's bedroom in the attic. She didn't usually like to, because it was always messy and had a funny smell. There were so many crumpled blankets up there, the bed looked like a nest for a very strange and lazy creature.

"What's the matter with you?"

"What's it usually feel like when you're drained?" Esther was taken aback by Sally deflecting her question with another. And a weird one, too. "Of electricity, I mean. Because you need it to sustain yourself." Esther narrowed her eyes.

"Why do you ask?"

"Because I think that's what's up with you."

"Yeah. Sure. Do you know how much I'd have to exert myself to be drained? I'd have to be summoning lightning bolts down from the sky, Sally," Esther told her matter-of-factly.

"Or raising the dead," Sally muttered, half to herself, but Esther still heard. Sally skimmed through the pages of her grotty old book some more, looking for something specific, it seemed.

" _What_?"

"You remember what I said about ghosts being real?" Sally asked. Esther didn't say a word and pressed a hand to her forehead. Ghosts, ghosts, ghosts – all the woman could think about was ghosts. "Don't give me that attitude, alright? You saw a ghost-"

"I don't know what I saw!" Esther protested.

"Just listen to me, I have it all written down here, all the science," Sally said, "Ghosts are electric, okay? They're made of electromagnetic energy. They manipulate lights and temperature and telephones, all sorts of things. They can control things around them through electrokinetic energy. This is scientific fact."

"Sure it is," Esther muttered.

"There's two parts to everyone, alright? The body and the soul. And _you_ know all about souls, after that stuff with Thomas Edison and his machine," Sally pointed out, "Harnessing human electromagnetic energy and converting it into power – it's a ghost machine. It's like the floor trap from _Ghostbusters_."

"Using alien technology," Esther pointed out, "It wasn't a naturally occurring phenomenon."

"Aliens could have come and given somebody the means to build oil rigs, doesn't mean the oil didn't exist in the first place," Sally said, "The souls and the energy were there, waiting to be converted. Don't you know that's how energy works?"

"Of course I know how energy works, I did AP Physics," Esther argued.

"I don't know what that means, so I'll just carry on," Sally said, "Every thought you've ever had and every memory and electrical signal sent through your nervous system is stored in your brain. It's a whole invisible kind of biology that people are too closeminded to notice. What _is_ consciousness? Well, it's… sort of like a cloud. An ethereal cloud of all the neurological data from your entire life that attaches itself together after you die because it's all from you. _That's_ a soul, _that's_ a ghost, when it detaches itself from your body and carries on."

"So what?" Esther questioned.

"So _you_ have the electrical output of a tesla coil, Esther, you're a walking, talking beacon for spectral energy," Sally 'explained.'

" _Spectral energy_?" Esther questioned, "You're being spooky again."

"That ghost used _you_ to manifest," Sally said, "Through the water."

"What's water got to do with anything?"

"Water is a conductor of residual paranormal energy. That ghost in the water latched onto _you_ and appeared to _you_ , and then followed _you_ to the services," Sally said, "You said yourself it looked like it had drowned. It drained you to appear, and that's why you're so tired now."

"If this is true-"

"Which it is!" Sally protested.

" _If_ ," Esther reiterated, "Then why have I never seen a ghost before, huh? Why aren't I seeing them walking around streets and towns? Sucking my electricity away constantly? If what you're saying is true, I wouldn't even _need_ the Syphon, I'd have my output mitigated by all the dead people I bump into."

"It's to do with traumatic deaths. There's _more_ electromagnetic activity in a brain that's in pain, or scared," Sally said, "That's why murder victims come back all the time. I'm pretty sure that they expire, though. Kind of. They can't sustain themselves forever so eventually they just sort of disperse. The more traumatic the death, the more electrical activity, the longer the spirit can linger. Probably has something to do with location, too – us being underwater, and stuff. That's a theory, though. I guess it would be pretty hard to get a ghost to discuss the scientific nature of its afterlife with you. They probably don't even know themselves, they're stuck in the moment, a lot of them."

"Sally, this is speculation," Esther told her firmly.

"Then what do _you_ think you saw, hmm? You're ignoring all the facts. Oswin's the one who figured all this out, you know. You're disagreeing with the hard science of _the_ most intelligent human being," Sally argued, "How do you think holograms work, hmm? The raw electrical data has to be recorded _somewhere_ to then be converted into a hologram. _She's_ a ghost."

"I don't think these are facts, and I don't know what I saw. My head feels like it's going to explode-"

"Because the ghost drained you!"

"Because I probably just caught a cold out in that forest!" Esther shouted back at her. Sally was stubborn, headstrong, and deluded, "Oswin is not well, you know that, you _know_ she's ill."

"This is nothing to do with her and _all_ to do with you, not accepting the truth right before your bloody eyes!" Sally argued as Esther stood up, leaving her half-drunk coffee on the floor.

"No, it isn't the truth. I've slept on it, I was probably _hallucinating_ because I'm ill."

"You know, denial isn't just a river in Egypt, Esther," Sally remarked, "Why are you so sceptical about the existence of ghosts? After everything you've seen-"

"Oh my god, can you just quit it? Please? This is not what I need right now," Esther told her coldly, "I'm going to have a shower, okay? And then I'm going to take some painkillers and stay in my darn room. The next time I see you, if I hear any mention of any of this _spooky_ nonsense, I will pack my bags and leave. And then who'll pay your rent, hmm?" Esther challenged.

"You're just as bad as he was, you know," Sally shouted at her as she left the front room, turning left immediately to head up the stairs in the middle of the house. Front door in front of the steps, kitchen straight on the right, sitting room straight on the left. Esther didn't know who 'he' was, but Sally kept yelling at her. "Just looking at me like I'm crazy, obsessed with things that don't exist, calling me 'Spooky Sally.' It's caused me so much trouble that you don't think I would have gotten some help before if it was really a problem? People like _you_ are the problem, Esther. And you know what, maybe I don't even want you in my house anymore!"

Esther slammed the bathroom door on her angry words, put her head in her hands and groaned. Since when did she get into fights? Fights about stupid things like ghosts. Well, she hadn't really lived with anybody since her college roommate, so she probably just wasn't used to sharing the space. It wasn't Sally's house to kick her out of, anyway, they were both just tenants, only the landlord could evict either of them. Esther had never even _met_ the landlord. Sally said he lived in Aberdeen and never came down to England anymore, all of her previous eviction notices had been posted.

One thing was true, though, she _did_ desperately need a shower. At least they kept the towels in the bathroom too, it wouldn't serve well for her attempt at dramatic effect if she had to leave and walk back through the living room to check the dryer for any, Sally Sparrow being indignant on the nearby couch. The warm water on her skin was a great relief, and she began to wonder if maybe she _was_ drained of electricity? Showers worked wonders for the human condition, she knew. Was there anything a hot shower couldn't fix? Well, maybe not _fix_ , but for twenty minutes they sure did make all her problems dissipate into something as light and frivolous as the steam around her.

Who had Sally been talking about, though? Esther was just as bad as 'he was'? He who? Someone who thought she was unhinged and losing it? Esther didn't know _what_ to think of Sally's psychiatric state, because annoyingly enough, she kind of made sense. And souls _did_ work in that way, Sally was right about that much. And she distinctly remembered Clara Oswald saying something to that effect about the existence of ghosts weeks ago. But, _she_ had died traumatically, she'd been shot and had bled out in a great deal of pain. But she didn't remember ever being a ghost. Her 'soul' was definitely still connected to her body – otherwise how would she be able to function? Be able to remember anything? If her lonely spirit was wandering around Buenos Aires somewhere looking to complete her 'unfinished business', or whatever it was ghosts did, wouldn't she know? Then again, strictly speaking, Clara Ravenwood didn't have a soul and still worked okay, minus reflections, religion, garlic and sunlight.

She was at a loss for what to do. Apologise for getting angry? For shouting Sally down? Implying she was delusional? In the back of her mind Esther knew that Sally was onto something. Sally was right about something else, too, that Esther didn't want to accept anything she'd seen. All she knew was she'd been freezing cold, had driven for hours, had been stressed about breaking into private property, and had then been so overcome with exhaustion that Sally had to drive them home. Maybe it wasn't nice for Esther to be throwing Sally's concern right back in her face though – it wasn't like she was trying to do anything other than help. Clearly, her motivations were pure. Esther felt like in this situation, _she_ was the bad guy, and she didn't like being the bad guy.

Esther yawned when, maybe half an hour later, she switched off the shower and stepped out. The towel was on the warm radiator and was pleasant when she wrapped herself in it. She was getting very sleepy again, though. Probably the effects of the hot water. At any rate, she was looking forward to taking her painkillers and crawling back into bed, though it did strike her as weird that she was still so exhausted after sleeping for fifteen hours. And it was coming on quickly, too… While she got dressed, she nearly fainted again, like she had done outside the car last night.

She was about to leave the room to throw herself down onto her mattress when she remembered she hadn't brushed her teeth yet, and they were getting kind of gross and had that furry feeling teeth did when you let the plaque gather for more than a day. She yawned again, picked up her toothbrush, went to wipe the fog away from the clouded mirror above the sink. And then she _screamed_. She _really_ screamed, dropped the toothbrush so that it clattered into the porcelain bowl and wheeled around to see _it_. That _thing_. Again, in her house, in her damn bathroom, its countenance revealed when she wiped the clouded mirror clear with her hand.

Except this time, when she turned away from the reflection, it did not disappear. Didn't just vanish into thin air. It stood there and stared at her, and Esther could take everything in. With a soundless mouth it made shapes and water came gushing out onto the tiles below, dark, muddy water, to go with dark, muddy eyes and soiled, filthy clothes. It was a girl, though, with long lank hair and a scraggy dress like rags. It had maybe had flowers on it once. She was young, too, definitely; probably not even twenty. She stared with hollow eyes, dripped water from every part of her body, her fingertips made waterfalls. Puddles swam around their feet, and Esther looked down to see her bare toes and the hems of her pyjama pants soaked and dark. That was when she noticed something, though, something that made her gasp and put a hand to her mouth. The girl who was standing in front of her, who was so pale in colour and practically glowed with some ethereal quality, only had one shoe. A sneaker. Vividly, Esther remembered the sneaker Sally had fished out of the mud the previous night, the one they had joked about before she dropped it back where she had found it.

For a second, Esther looked into its eyes, eyes full of fear and death, wide like a rabbit's when it ran in front of a car and seemed to realise the end was about to hit it at forty miles an hour and crush its hide into the asphalt. Then she became aware of loud banging on the door, the door handle being turned as somebody tried to get in and shouted at her. Esther's eyes drifted away from the spectre for just a moment, but in the blink of an eye it vanished again, like it had never been there, and she collapsed into the sink just in time for Sally to force the door open and come to her aid.

"What is it? What the hell's going on? Did you lock the door?" Sally asked her, trying to help keep her upright, which was tricky when she had to avoid touching her skin.

"It was here, it was just here," Esther told her in gasps, struggling to stay on her feet. It had really taken it out of her this time.

"You need electricity, alright?" Sally told her, "Look at this." She lifted up Esther's hand by the wrist until Esther wrenched it out of her grasp.

"Don't touch me!"

"Nothing happened!" Sally said right back at her, "You're so lucky I'm not a gay pervert taking advantage of this opportunity to feel you up, Esther, because right now _you_ couldn't shock a bloody taser. You're going to die if you don't get off of your high horse and suck some electricity out of something, alright?"

"Fine!" Esther argued, in a foul mood again, and she pushed Sally away from her and held up a hand towards the lightbulb. Strictly speaking, Esther was 5'1", and could not actually _reach_ the lightbulb. But she didn't need to reach it to drain from it. It looked just like when she made herself a circuit and let the energy flow between her fingers, blue and bright and filling the room with light. Except it fed out of the bulb into her palm instead, sucking straight out of the filament until the bulb went dead. Sally had never seen her drain anything before. Esther never normally needed to.

"Does, um, does that break the lightbulb? Because we don't have any replacements."

"It'll come back on in a minute," Esther assured her quietly, leaning on the sink. She glanced down at the floor, where there had been pools of water. But she had not electrified those pools, so they couldn't have been real. There was no evidence of them now.

She didn't get much from the bulb, but she got enough not to faint for the time being, and to walk on her own. Walk she did, straight past Sally Sparrow across the landing into her own room, making a beeline for the Syphon 2.0, the source of all her worldly needs. The Syphon's job was to keep her charge levels stable, and right now, boy, they were anything but stable. She sat, cross-legged, on the floor in front of it and used both of her hands to drain. Sally loitered in the doorway and watched.

"Y'know, I don't appreciate you staring at me like I'm a sideshow attraction," Esther mumbled, trying to pay more attention to the electricity being absorbed into her palms and making the veins down her arms glow cerulean.

"…Sorry… but, um, you believe me now? Right? It happened again, latched onto you? After you showered, which is water, again? Running water especially conducts spirits," Sally said. Esther sighed and stopped draining the Syphon. Annoyingly enough, she felt a lot better.

"Have I ever told you about Sarah?" Esther asked her. Sally narrowed her eyes.

"Your sister, you mean? The one who gave you the keyring that looks like the _Pac-Man_ ghost?" Sally said, closing the door and then leaning against it, looking down to her left at Esther on the floor.

"Yeah. You know how I said Oswin's unwell? Sarah wasn't well either. The Miracle kind of… broke her. She was already broken, but _I_ got her institutionalised because I was worried about the kids – they're Alice and Melanie. They still live in Virginia, Melanie's nineteen now, Alice is sixteen. She jumped off of a roof after the Miracle, after I died, and I figure that's traumatic. That… that girl I keep seeing, she's not happy. She's tormented. I don't like the idea of that happening to my sister, all because _I_ was stupid enough to get myself shot, okay? I don't want her to be trapped like that girl is, to be tortured. So maybe I don't want to believe the things you're telling me, but I hardly think that's a crime."

"That wasn't your fault, Esther," Sally told her, "It wasn't your fault she killed herself."

"Oh yeah? If I'd just dropped Torchwood when Jack retconned me, or taken the money when the CIA tried to buy me out, or just run off at any point, she might still be here. Those kids might still have their mother, _I_ might still have my sister," Esther said. This was way too much emotional baggage to be unloading on a Sunday morning.

"I'm sorry."

"Don't be, it's nothing to do with you," Esther sighed, then she didn't see anything for a while and watched the mechanical orb in the middle of the Syphon's cone-like structure float and spin around in its pulsating column of static rings. It was hypnotic. Often times she watched it while she fell asleep, like you might look at a lava lamp. "What did you mean, I'm 'just as bad as he was'?"

"Oh," Sally said, leaving the door and going to sit on the edge of Esther's bed. She'd never sat there before, and was surprised and nearly toppled over when she sank much more than she was expecting, "Christ, how much memory foam do you have?"

"Like, a lot," Esther said, "It has a heated mattress cover, too. You don't know what it's like sleeping on a prison-style cot for four years. What were you talking about, though?"

"Just, um… just a bloke."

"Oh yeah? What 'bloke'?" Esther asked. She always thought 'bloke' was a weird word, and she wondered where it came from.

"Don't say that, it sounds wrong with your accent," Sally said, and Esther laughed slightly.

"Who, though?"

"Ex-fiancé." _The_ ex-fiancé that Sally never spoke about. Esther didn't even know his name. "Said I was too 'spooky,' and I was 'obsessed' with the supernatural. Which is ridiculous, because _his_ sister was transported back in time to 1920 by the Weeping Angels. _He_ was in the TARDIS, _he_ saw the Doctor, too. So he left me. After, like, six years."

" _Six years_? That's a long time to be with someone without actually tying the knot."

"Oh, _he_ was desperate. _I_ was distracted, kept flaking on things. I was definitely out of his league, and I _was_ his sister's best friend. Kathy turned out better than Larry did, anyway," she sighed sadly. She kept prodding the mattress.

"You were Sally and Larry? Isn't that that film? _When Larry Met Sally_?"

"It's _When HARRY Met Sally_ , actually," she snapped, but it was in a joking way. Esther figured she must have heard that before, "That's why I moved all the way up here, anyway. You know, I kind of wish we _were_ secretly lesbian lovers, or something, so I had an excuse to sleep in this comfy bed you have. Do you spend _all_ your money on soft furnishings?"

"No, most of it I spend on your rent."

"Maybe I'll sleep in it anyway. You're too nice to kick me out. You'd go sleep on the sofa, or something," Sally said, "What a tragedy I was born heterosexual. I shouldn't let Clara hear me say that, though, less I get molested. Do you want to see a picture of us together?"

"Clara doesn't show up in pictures."

"Me and Larry. Not me and Clara. Why would you think I had pictures of me and Clara?"

"Well I didn't, that's why I said she doesn't show up in them. And I don't know, what's so great about these photos? They're not weird, are they..?" Esther asked guardedly as Sally picked up Esther's phone off of Esther's bed. "What're you doing?"

"Borrowing your phone to go on Facebook."

"I don't have Facebook, I'm not allowed; I'm supposed to be dead. Besides, you don't know my passcode."

"Sure I do, it's your birthday," Sally said, putting Esther's phone back down and standing up off the bed, giving up invading Esther's privacy because it was true, she really didn't have Facebook anymore.

"You don't know my birthday."

"It's the 4th of May. 0504, because you Americans do the date wrong," she went to leave the room, and Esther, not wanting to be left on her own in the house in case she had to be the sole witness to another ghost attack, scrambled to her feet to follow.

"How do you know that? I never told you my birthday," Esther questioned her, "Did I? Why have you been trying to get into my phone anyway? There's nothing on it."

"I know, I've been through it. I had to check you weren't, like, I don't know, a crazy serial killer or something," Sally shrugged, walking past the bathroom and then the spare room to go to the narrow staircase to the attic.

"Couldn't you just _ask_ me?" Esther trailed after her.

"A serial killer would never _tell_ you they're a serial killer." Esther couldn't actually say she was surprised by this behaviour, but it didn't bother her as much as it should have. Mainly because the only reason she actually had a lock on her phone was to stop it from calling people in her pocket; she had a phone that liked to do that before, and it was a total pain.

"Well what's _your_ birthday?"

"Not my phone passcode."

"I just mean in general."

"1st of October, about a week overdue. That means I'm a Valentine's Day baby, which goes some to telling you what sort of people my parents were," Sally said, but she didn't say anything more. Esther had never asked Sally about her parents, but going by how she had said before that she didn't have anyone else in her life apart from this ex-fiancé of hers, Esther usually assumed they were dead. At any rate, she didn't want to ask now.

On the stairs up to the attic there were all sorts of things; spare change, dirty towels, lost socks, pairs of grimy shoes. It all just foreshadowed the mess that Sally Sparrow's room actually was, and Esther was still unsure what she was actually about to be shown. Esther's room was neat and organised. Sally's room was a pigsty of unprecedented proportions. If Esther wasn't there to tidy up the other rooms, Sally would happily wallow in her own filth every day of the week in the entire house. She had only ever been in there once before, in the whole month she'd been living there, and she hadn't been in there for very long, she'd been looking for any dirty crockery Sally might have been collecting so that she could wash it. Sally had gladly pawned off on Esther half a dozen dirty old mugs, one of them with a thick coating of green fur within. Nowadays, Esther was very strict about keeping tabs on what Sally took up to her bedroom. Still, she spied a mug on the windowsill.

Directly on the right was the aforementioned nest-bed with a lot of quilts and blankets stacked up on top of it – did Sally just curl up in a creepy little ball when she went to sleep? Didn't she have a normal duvet?

"Do you even know how to make a bed?" Esther, whose bed was always pristine with not a crease in sight, questioned her.

"What's the point of making it when it's just going to get messed up again?" Sally said, going left to one of the bookshelves. It was from this shelf Esther knew the notebook she had been referring to earlier was from. She was looking for something. Dirty clothes were strewn about everywhere; Esther was sure the chest of drawers in the corner had never gotten any use from Sally, unless she kept more weird books in it, and there were a _lot_ of weird books. There were small and large photos on the walls, some of them full size prints, some of them taken with a tiny little disposable camera. The only thing Sally Sparrow kept organised was her camera equipment. Her cameras she put back in their boxes when she wasn't using them, had them in a neat tower in one corner with two tripods and one of those huge lights. The only camera that _wasn't_ neatly in its box was the one Sally had been using last night, which was sitting on the floor by the bed.

"I wish you would clean," Esther sighed, looking around pitifully at the state of the room, "This is disgusting."

"You clean my room if you're so fussed," Sally told her distractedly. Esther glanced over. She was looking through a large hardback book, which Esther quickly realised wasn't a book, it was a photo album, one of many Sally possessed.

"I would prefer not to."

"Well, then, don't complain," Sally shrugged, "Oh, god, some of these photos are terrible. I didn't take them, you see. As if I'd put a bad photo of me in an album, but…" She sighed.

"What is that?" Esther walked over. As usual when she didn't have her special gloves on, she kept her arms tightly crossed.

"It's a wedding present from my ex-future-mother-in-law," Sally answered, "She liked me because she met me before, when I only knew Kathy. We went to university together, Larry's older. I never met him before the stuff with the Angels. She had a huge go at him when he told her he'd left me, and she found me and gave me this, because she didn't want it to go to waste. See?" Sally held up a photo to Esther, and Esther was taken aback. It was Sally in a wedding dress. There was something about Sally that made it hard for Esther to envision her ever _actually_ getting married to somebody, but then, Esther often found it hard to imagine marriage. She didn't really understand it, or the whole thing about feeling so strongly about somebody else you had to bind yourselves together legally. "I had to take the dress back to the shop, though."

"That sucks."

"I suppose, but I didn't need it. I didn't even like it that much, I sort of got forced to go dress shopping. I wanted it to be over as soon as possible. Anyway, I was trying to find a picture of Larry," she said, sticking the photo of her in the wedding dress back in the photo album.

"What happened to the photos you took yesterday?" Esther asked.

"Oh, those? They're still on the camera memory card," Sally answered, "Why?"

"You could have got a photo of her! Of the ghost!" Esther said, going straight over to the camera. Sally stuck her photo album back on the shelf.

"Don't touch that camera! You might break it," Sally warned. Esther froze just when she had been about to pick it up, and clenched her fists. Sally was right, she might break it, "Besides, I was looking at you when you saw that thing, I didn't take a picture."

"Oh, so it's not even worth it to check now?" Esther questioned, and Sally paused, "Let me put in my computer." She thought this over. She was protective of her photography stuff. Esther figured it was expensive.

"Well, I… okay, but only if you put your gloves on. Alright?"

"Sure, sure, c'mon," Esther said urgently, heading for the door to go back downstairs. Sally picked up the camera and came with, Esther retrieving her gloves from where she kept them on her desk when she returned to her own room, "She could have been watching us for ages before I saw her."

"I would have noticed," Sally told her, but Esther ignored her pessimism. Sally gave Esther the memory card, not allowing her to touch the camera itself, and then put the camera down on the floor next to her. She sat right on the end of Esther's bed to lean over and see the computer from an awkward angle, Esther waiting for it to turn on properly. "Why do you need so many screens?"

"You mean monitors. And because I have an important job to do."

"Getting paid to stalk Clara's clones?"

"They're called Echoes, but…"

"Trawling the internet for anything 'spooky'?" she remarked, and Esther clenched her jaw.

"It's useful to have different databases and websites open and visible at once, alright? I don't criticise your photography, do I?"

"Nothing to criticise," Sally said defensively.

"Well, we'll see about that in about thirty seconds, won't we?" Esther countered. Sally lurked and watched Esther carefully, as though she were sceptical of Esther's ability to use a computer. She'd been a data analyst at the CIA, for crying out loud, of _course_ she knew how to use a computer. But, these photos _were_ Sally's livelihood, so she couldn't blame her for being worried about them.

"You know, I – I usually have time to edit them and make them look nice," Sally said.

"Huh?"

"The photos."

"I'm sure they're very nice, Sally, but I care more about this ghost girl," Esther said, "I promise I won't pass judgement on them until you've edited them later." Sally actually thanked her for that. So, she really _was_ one of those creative types who needed everything to be perfect before they released it unto the world. Well, Esther respected that, and they were Sally's intellectual property, but she really wanted to help this girl before she popped up to her again.

Truth be told, Esther didn't find the photos very interesting. She'd been there last night when they were all taken, and they were either pitch black or bright blue. The pitch black ones she totally ignored because she could see by the thumbnails there wasn't any ghostly visage peering through the windows, so she moved onto the blue ones. The way the shadows moved about was good though, as agitated as Sally was next to her, and she only had her lightning powers to thank for that. Knowing exactly where the face would show up, around the bottom right, she skimmed them quickly.

"Holy…"

"What? Did you find it?" Sally asked her urgently.

"Her. I found _her_. Look," Esther pointed it out, she zoomed in on it. It sure was a good thing that Sally had such a high quality camera, because zooming in barely degraded the bitmap. And there it was, pale and transluscent, glowing in the lightning Esther had been making, staring with dark eyes and sunken features through the mottled glass right at the camera.

"I told you ghosts are real."

"Shut it," Esther muttered, minimising the photo viewer.

"What are you doing?"

"Um, _duh_ , using facial recognition software to run this through the British Facial Database," Esther said.

"The what?"

"The database that has a picture of every registered British citizen on it. They get them from all sorts of places – passports, driver's license, Facebook. Don't get me wrong, it's totally whack, a violation of privacy laws and the Data Protection Act, but you'd be surprised at… well, actually _you_ wouldn't be surprised at how little your government cares about the civil rights of its public. Not that the US is any better, I mean, think Patriot Act, authorised surveillance. My whole job was based on authorised surveillance." She said all of this while she copied and cropped the bitmap down so it was just the face. Scanning it with software illegally acquired by Adam Mitchell was worryingly easy.

"Wait – do they have me?" Sally asked.

"They sure do, unless you were lying about having a driver's license yesterday," Esther said, then she added, "Sorry. I know how you don't like stuff like that. But if you don't break the law, you'll be fine."

"For an ex-fugitive, you really do like the law," Sally grumbled.

"Regular government don't have access to it, it's Torchwood software," Esther explained, "Torchwood bypasses a lot of red tape that stop the police so that they can carry out their duty. They can get records of adoption without a warrant, and search premises. Well, they used to be able to. _We_ used to be able to." She sighed sadly.

"Memories," Sally commented.

"Yeah, I guess…"

"She's not exactly got the most recognisable face anymore."

"It's good software," Esther said, "It's a good photo, too. Ah-ha, see? No need to worry, look, Sophia Baker, born in September, 1999."

"God, she was only sixteen," Sally said, "Well, maybe not, I guess we don't know when she died…"

"Recently."

"How do you know?"

"Her feet," Esther said, looking at Sally, who frowned, "Oh – sorry – I forgot – that sneaker you found yesterday? You remember?"

"It's a trainer, but yeah."

"That's hers. She only had one shoe on, when I saw her, I noticed. The other one matched the one you found, and that shoe didn't look all that old," Esther said, searching the name _Sophia Baker_ in an advanced search engine that was about as illegal as the invasive facial database she had.

"What's that?" Sally pointed out a link and then read it out, " _Local Girl Missing_. It's dated for last Monday, in _The Surrey Mirror_." Esther clicked it and read the article itself aloud.

"' _Sixteen year-old Sophia Baker was declared missing yesterday … parents worried, they plead that Sophia will return to them, and_ …' Oh, god…" Esther had scrolled down to see a photo of the girl, Sophia Baker, looking happy and, most importantly, alive. She leant back in her chair and covered her mouth with her hand, at which point Sally reached over and took control of the mouse. She wasn't as fazed as Esther was. She hadn't seen Sophia standing there, soaked and dead, like looking at somebody through a blueish, morbid window. Sally didn't find much more, though.

"What do you think happened?" Sally asked her.

"What? I don't know, how should I…" Esther trailed off and stared at the picture of the girl on the screen, until Sally switched off the monitor and left Esther looking at her own damp-haired, harrowed reflection. She turned the swivel chair away from herself and faced Sally on the edge of the bed, who was all seriousness now. "What do you mean?"

"I mean, do you think it was an accident? Do you think she was killed?" Sally asked.

"Who'd kill a sixteen year old girl?" Esther asked.

"These articles always make the kids seem like angels, but we don't know her. She could've been mixed up in something, you never know."

"We have to do something. Like… like call the police."

"And tell them what, that you saw a ghost?"

"No, I redirect the call and fake being a witness who saw her climb over the fence into Witley Park last Sunday, and advise them to drag the lake," Esther said, "Or… or you do it."

" _Me_? Why me?"

"Because an American calling up would look kinda weird, don't you think? I sort of stick out in these rural areas, and you don't think it'd be easy for them to figure that there isn't an American living in their little village? You better do it," Esther said, "Then the cops can figure if she was murdered or not."

"But what if she _was_?" Sally asked, "Why would she lose her shoe, hmm?"

"What do you mean?"

"If she was there, all on her own, wandering around, and she tripped and lost her shoe, wouldn't she have stopped to put it back on? It's the middle of winter, Esther. Didn't I say it was like whoever-it-was was running away from something?"

"She was sixteen, she could have been spooked by anything. Could've been the owners figuring out that there was a trespasser, or a dog, or just a noise nearby – _I_ thought those woods were pretty creepy. Why don't you have faith in the cops? What do you want us to do, go back down there and poke around? We can't do that, we have no credentials. I have an ID from 2011 that says I work internally at the CIA. For that lie to spin, I'd have to say she was a… a cyberterrorist, and I'm a computer specialist with the most suspicious jurisdiction this side of the Atlantic," Esther said, "Let the police deal with it, a girl's died, they'll make sure there was no foul play." Suddenly it was Esther's turn to be sensible and correct. They couldn't just show up someplace, they didn't have the Doctor's psychic paper and they didn't have Torchwood.

"We could ask her. Ask her how she died. Next time she shows up."

"She can't talk, her lungs are… there's just water, she can't speak," Esther informed her sadly.

"She doesn't need to speak, she's a ghost, she can manipulate the environment," Sally said.

"Meaning..?"

" _Meaning_ I have a Ouija board."

"You have a _what_!? Why!? Why do you have that in the house? Those things are, like, gateways to hell!"

"Since when did you believe in hell and demons?"

"Well, I… I don't, but I'd prefer not to open a door to summon one. I can't believe you have a Ouija board."

"It's under my bed."

" _Under your bed_!? Are you crazy, Sally!?" Esther demanded, "You can't keep those things there. They attract, you know, _bad spirits_."

"You're giving off some really mixed signals when it comes to your belief in the occult."

"Well… well my mom was religious, okay? And you can never be too careful," Esther advised her.

"We should have a séance."

"Yeah, _or_ , we could, like, _not_ do that. Like, _at all_. Seriously."

" _Bo-ring_ ," Sally trilled.

"Sensible," Esther argued flatly, "Summoning the dead is not sensible."

"You've already summoned the dead three times in the last twenty-four hours; you're a hypocrite."

"Not on purpose, though! I wouldn't summon the dead _on purpose_."

"That's not true, you invited Clara over for supper just two weeks ago." Esther wasn't sure inviting Clara over fit the description of 'summoning the dead,' but Sally was being stubborn. Esther's streak of being correct and unopposed by Sally Sparrow was drawing to a close.

"We're not having a séance, Sally, end of. There is no way on Earth that I would ever let you have some creepy, fake, spiritual ceremony in our house, I'm putting my foot down."

* * *

"I really don't know how you convinced me to do this," Esther grumbled, sitting cross-legged on the floor in the living room, with the curtains drawn tightly, the lights switched off, and a hefty amount of wax candles from Sally's stockpile in her panic basement lit on all sides. The Ouija board and its planchette sat between them.

"You're a bit of a pushover."

"Thanks," she muttered.

"Don't worry about it, I've done loads of séances," Sally assured her with a smile. _Oh my god, she's crazy_ , Esther thought to herself. She should pack her bags and go take her chances with the vampire down the street and her alien girlfriend. "It'll be fine, we just say, were you murdered? Then it's yes or no. Then we ask her to spell the name of her killer, we call the police anonymously, and we'll have helped a tormented spirit move on. Into the light, or whatever."

"I thought you said they just expire?"

"Well… well I don't know," Sally said, "I'm trying to be optimistic. You're a real downer sometimes."

"I am not!"

"Your negativity is going to ruin the energy of the séance."

"The _energy of the séance_?"

"Just trust me, I know what I'm doing," Sally said. Esther didn't think she did actually know what she was doing. Sure, she _thought_ she knew what she was doing, but did she? No way. This would not work. And if it did work, it would be a coincidence, because Esther had a knack for making the ghost of Sophia Baker appear.

Esther tried to zone out and ignore a lot of the weird stuff Sally Sparrow proceeded to say, about rites and 'using their energy' and 'passing over' and all sorts of what Esther would describe as 'mumbo jumbo' if she were being rude. How did she get mixed up in this? She just wanted a quiet life where there wouldn't be anything weird or dangerous. And now she was using a Ouija board to summon a spirit that was stalking her. Where did it all go wrong?

There were signs, though, in the atmosphere; as much as she hated to admit it. Not the kinds of signs Sally would notice, but there was that nagging sensation of exhaustion, like the life was being drained out of Esther. _Energy_ , Sally would probably say. And the room got colder. Sally noticed that one. She noticed Esther yawning, as well. Her yawning was a 'good sign,' apparently. Esther wondered if it was only getting colder because Sally had forgotten to turn the boiler on and it was still snowy outside, but she hadn't actually checked to see if the boiler was on, and she didn't want to interrupt Sally's flow to ask about it. She was getting really into her ritual, Esther would hate to spoil her fun.

She crossed her arms and felt herself tense, keeping a lookout for any mysterious pools of water or drowned phantasms.

"…We call on you, the lost soul of Sophia Baker, to greet us here today and reveal-" Sally was right in the middle of her spiel and Esther was getting more and more agitated and tired. The room was dark and tense and the candles were freaking her out, and she was desperately trying to stop herself from shaking like a leaf. From the cold or from fear at having to see that ghost again, she didn't know. As much as she really did want to help Sophia, she wished Sophia didn't look so… scary.

But it was at that point that a sharp knock on the door interrupted. Esther jumped and a candle blew out next to her. It was the middle of the day, but the curtains were thick and drawn so tightly it might as well be four in the morning for all the light they got. All she had wanted that morning was to build a snowman, she thought pitifully. Upon hearing the knock, she and Sally exchanged a nervous look.

"Who the hell could that be?" Sally whispered. Esther shrugged.

"Beats me," she hissed back, annoyed.

"Wait, what if it's the ghost?" Sally whispered back. Esther stared at her in disbelief.

" _At the door_!? Since when did ghosts knock on doors?"

"Maybe she really liked knocking on doors when she was alive?" Sally suggested.

" _What_?" There were two more, louder, knocks at the door, and another pause between them. Then Sally's brow creased in thought.

"Hang on, what day is it?"

"It's Sunday," Esther answered, and Sally didn't speak. "What is it?"

"It's the milkman," Sally told her.

"Oh my god. I can't believe you just-"

"Shh," Sally told her, standing up and walking past her to get to the door. She left the door to the sitting room open as she unlocked the front door, and Esther just watched as she quite happily opened it and greeted the milkman. Esther couldn't see him, but she could hear him, and she listened to them chatter, getting annoyed at how long Sally was taking. Was it even possible to have two British people in a room together without them discussing the weather at length? Had neither of them seen snow before?

When Sally glanced at her for a moment, Esther raised her eyebrows in question, and Sally cleared her throat and went about trying to get the elderly and irritatingly friendly and personable milkman to leave them alone so they could carry on opening portals into the afterlife without dairy-oriented harassment. She had to say goodbye at least half a dozen times, holding a two-pint bottle of green-labelled milk in one hand, gradually closing the door until he just had to leave.

Sally shut the door, locked it, turned to come back into the living room, and then gasped and dropped the milk bottle onto the floor. It was a good thing it was plastic, or it would definitely have shattered. It didn't shatter, or spill, it was fine, but the milk wasn't the thing that was bothering Esther (well, it kind of was, because a milk stain would be awful to try and wash out of the carpet and would stink to high heaven.) Esther had been watching the door, Sally was now facing Esther and looking at something behind her. Slowly, Esther turned as well, and saw the sopping wet, transluscent ghost of Sophia Baker, complete with spectral, glowing aura, standing right there in their sitting room, and now they were _both_ witnesses.

She never seemed to stick around for more than a couple of seconds though, so they had to act fast before they were stuck waiting for her to make her next appearance. Esther could feel herself getting more and more exhausted, though, tired by the second.

"You – you're Sophia Baker, we know you," Esther said pleadingly. The girl was just sixteen and she was taller than Esther. Well, most people were taller than Esther, in all honesty, "We saw you went missing last week, we're going to call the police, but you have to tell us how you died first, if you were murdered, okay, Sophia?" Esther didn't have to know Sally Sparrow for more than a few weeks to know that she was miles more empathetic. If either of them were to talk to a lost, terrified spirit, it had better be Esther.

Sophia, though, couldn't speak. Something to do with the water, the water which came pouring forth from between her icy lips whenever she opened her mouth, splashing down into the carpet below.

"Write it – or, spell it, I mean – with the Ouija board, see?" Esther pointed it out to the phantom, and the phantom looked in that general direction, and then raised a ghostly, see-through arm and pointed at something. But it wasn't the Ouija board. Esther followed the hand and saw the notebook next to the landline in the corner of the room they used to write down messages. Strictly speaking, she'd never had to write a message down, it was usually used to put takeout orders. The pen, though, the pen was _floating_. It was one of the most surreal experiences of Esther Drummond's life. Nowadays, she supposed, anything was possible. Even _this_.

Sally and Esther both watched, entranced. There was a moment where Sophia Baker's spirit was there, communicating, and the pen moved awkwardly above the page like a child who didn't know how to write. And then, instantaneously, the moment was over. All of the candles blew out, thin strips of white light were visible around the edges of the curtain only, and the pen dropped itself back down.

The ghost was gone. They were alone.

"What did she write?" Sally asked.

"Turn the light on," Esther ordered. Sally did so as Esther went to pick up the notepad. The handwriting was large and messy, but legible, and it answered their question, "It says, ' _Accident. I fell in the lake. Not Oscar's fault_.' That's all." Sally took the notebook out of her hands to read it, and Esther sat down on the sofa.

"She could be covering for him."

"Huh?"

"This Oscar guy. He could be… some boyfriend, I don't know. Murdered her. Or maybe she doesn't remember properly. She could have been pushed, or-"

"Sally, stop. Sometimes there are just tragedies, and they're nobody's fault," Esther sighed, rubbing her eyes, and then she yawned again, "Just… just call the police, and… and…" She passed out on the sofa.

* * *

She woke up a long while later, feeling sick of sleeping. She thought she would have slept even longer had she not smelled food. She had hardly eaten yesterday, and hadn't eaten at all yet that Sunday, and heard her stomach rumble immediately upon awakening. She had a blanket over her, the fireplace was stoked and burning away nicely, the curtains were open so that the clear black night outside was revealed, though there were not a lot of stars visible. There was still snow on the rooftops across the street. Was there enough left to still try and build a snowman, she wondered?

It didn't take more than a couple of seconds to realise that the intoxicating smell drifting towards her from the kitchen was bacon. Bacon was one of planet Earth's most appetising smells already, it didn't need to be combined with extreme fatigue and mild starvation. The mix of Esther's hunger and the smell of frying meat in the next room was more pain than she could bear, and she rose from the couch like a zombie rising from the grave, shuffling with a blanket around her shoulders. Sally Sparrow was flipping the bacon over as Esther entered the kitchen, humming something upbeat to herself probably from one of those obscure jazz records she kept stashed away in the attic. When she turned and saw Esther, she jumped and dropped the tongs.

"Christ, you scared me," she said.

"Sorry," Esther apologised, "Do you want me to wash those?"

"It's fine, do it later, I'll just use a fork," Sally said, picking up the tongs and dropping them in the sink for Esther to do the washing up later. Esther _always_ did the washing up, because Sally outright refused to do it until she couldn't find a clean mug. And she had a nasty habit of rinsing her mugs and not getting a fresh one for days on end, so that took quite a while. Esther refused to live in self-induced squalor, though. "Are you hungry? Do you want a sandwich?"

"I would _kill_ for a bacon sandwich right now."

"I thought you were a vegetarian?"

"…Why would you think I was a vegetarian? I made chicken for dinner on Tuesday."

"Yeah, but, I thought you were a vegetarian who's just really bad at being a vegetarian. One of the ones who eats fish."

"That's a pescetarian, and I'm not," Esther told her, "And chicken's not a fish anyway!" Sally paused.

"Weird… you can go sit back down if you want, I'll make you one," Sally offered.

"You never do anything for me though," Esther pointed out.

"I do, I make you coffee all the time," Sally argued, "And I drove us back last night so that you wouldn't crash and die."

"I'd hardly call that doing me a favour, but fine," Esther relented. She was so darn tired, she'd really prefer not to make her own supper. On her way out, she asked, "What time is it?"

"Dunno. About half six, I think," Sally replied. So she'd been asleep for just under six hours. Of the last twenty-four hours of Esther Drummond's life, she'd been unconscious for twenty-one of them. They better not make a habit of ghost hunting.

She only started to think about Sophia Baker's spirit when she had sat back down in her armchair, moved from Sally's sofa. She didn't know how things had gone. Had Sally called the police? Esther hadn't been there to bounce the call off multiple satellites, and she was pretty sure Sally didn't know how to do that. It wasn't exactly a common skill. So where did they stand with their plight, their mystery? The parents still hoped the girl was alive and would be found safely. Esther didn't want to think about how devastated they would be to learn their daughter had drowned in a freezing lake in midwinter. She was vacantly aware of some weird British show playing on the television, and had started paying attention to it by the time Sally came back into the room and bestowed on Esther the most delicious food the universe had to offer, a dead pig and some bread. Simplicity was underrated.

"What's this?" she asked, nodding at the TV.

" _Coach Trip_ ," Sally answered, "It's a repeat though."

"All your TV is repeats." Sally made a noise of agreement with her mouth full, and only explained the show's premise once she'd eaten half her sandwich.

"Basically, they all go on this coach in pairs, and every day they vote for somebody to leave. You have to be voted off twice to leave, though, and they go all over Europe. So the aim is to be as nice as possible so everyone likes you and doesn't get rid of you," Sally said.

"Boy, you Brits sure like your in-fighting," Esther said, "That's what the TARDIS is like." Sally laughed. Esther changed the subject abruptly. "Did you call the police?" Sally coughed on a crust for a second.

"Mmmhmm," she answered.

"Seriously? What did you say?"

"What you told me to say, that I was just driving past and I'm sure I saw a girl who looked exactly like Sophia Baker climbing over the fence with a boy last week, and I convinced them to drag the lake to find her body. Problem solved."

"Don't call her a 'problem.'"

"Sorry."

"Didn't they trace you?"

"I called off your phone, it's untraceable, right? Because Captain Up-Himself doesn't want people tracking you to find out where you live, since you're a dead fugitive?" Esther had forgotten that something had been done to her phone to stop it being traced. It still bugged her that Sally knew her phone passcode, though, _and_ her birthday.

"Never take me somewhere haunted again, okay?"

"Well I didn't _know_ the underwater ballroom was haunted," Sally said, "Honest. But, don't you want to help the lost souls?"

"All we do is shorten their afterlifespan, or whatever you want to call it. There's no other side. I know that for a fact. I was dead for four years, and it was just darkness, there wasn't anything there. Jack'll tell you the exact same thing. You're speeding up the inevitability of empty oblivion, and I'll have nothing more to do with interfering with the natural order," Esther told her firmly, "You go to haunted places if you want, but I'm not coming." Sally didn't say anything for a while. Maybe she'd gotten it into her head that she and Esther would go around freeing trapped spirits and helping them 'move on.' Esther thought any life, no matter how tortured, was better than no life at all. Her philosophy may have been different before she died, but now? She'd rather be a human lightning rod than six feet under, rotting, non-existent.

"Alright, fine. No more ghosts."

"Do you promise?"

" _Do I promise_? Are we twelve?" Sally retorted. Esther sighed. "Ugh, fine. I promise, I won't drag you out to any more creepy locations."

"Thank you, I appreciate it."

"Uh-huh. Sure. Now, they're about to vote on TV, and I'm pretty sure that bitchy mother and daughter are for the chop today." Esther settled back down in her arm chair and decided to try and follow what was going on while she ate, and felt relaxed. There was something in the air that made her sure that the ghost of Sophia Baker really had shed its parasitic attachment to Esther, and it was as calming as the thought of the hot chocolate she was going to make herself as soon as she finished her sandwich was.

 **AN: Chapter originally uploaded on May 4th, Esther's birthday, spookily enough. I didn't make it her birthday just because it was today's date, though, I made sure to upload today because I realised it was coincidentally the birthday I gave her months ago.**


	3. The Mysterious Hat: Part One

_The Mysterious Hat_

 _-Part One-_

"What kind of cheese do you want?" Sally Sparrow asked her. Esther wasn't paying a lot of attention to the cheese, she was checking the sell-by dates on cartons of milk and wondering whether they needed to buy two pints or four pints. The amount of tea and coffee they both drank in those wintry months, it was probably worth it to buy more, but she couldn't find a bottle that didn't go off within the next two days. "Oi, Esther."

"What?"

"What sort of cheese, I said."

"Get whatever, I'm not the biggest cheese fan," Esther told her. She never ate cheese unless it was in a sandwich or on pasta, and she didn't really like cheese sandwiches and they didn't actually have any pasta. They should really bulk buy some, come to think of it, while they had the opportunity. While Sally had money. It almost annoyed Esther that she really had been able to sell those photos of the Witley Park ballroom from a month ago for a pretty good sum. Esther still wouldn't get her insured to drive her car, though.

"Well neither am I."

"Then don't get any cheese?" Esther suggested. The possibility of not buying cheese didn't even seem to have crossed Sally's mind.

"It's always good to have cheese, though. In case of an emergency."

"What sort of emergency are you thinking of here?"

"Lactose intolerant serial killer whose victims are all blonde women breaks into our house," Sally told her firmly from a ways down the aisle. Esther just frowned and dug far in the back of the fridge to dig out a bottle of whole milk that had a five day lease of life on it. This was good enough, she decided, and she lugged it back to put in the trolley, which Sally was in possession of. Sally was paying for groceries, and in nearly two months this was the first time Esther had _ever_ seen her pay of groceries.

"Are you getting cheese or not?" Esther questioned, "It's _your_ money." Sally sighed and moved on, then doubled back and grabbed a pack of Cheese Strings on a childish whim. "Aren't they for little kids?"

"Being five feet tall is for little kids, Esther." Esther scowled at her, and she smiled smugly to herself.

"I'm five-one," Esther defended herself.

"Wow, colour me intimidated."

"You know those things probably don't contain any actual cheese, right?" Esther commented on the Cheese Strings.

"They probably don't contain any actual string, either. Get a load of false advertising. I blame the government," Sally told her, and Esther sighed and gave up. It was like arguing with a brick wall, just a snarky brick wall who had to answer back to everything. "Oh look, speaking of little kids," Sally nodded as they turned the aisle.

Esther was quite surprised to see who she was pointing out, because there was Clara Ravenwood and Jenny Harkness, shopping just down the way. Clara spied Sally almost immediately and waved at the pair of them.

"Put that down, would you?" Clara ordered her girlfriend, which was when Esther saw Jenny was holding a rubber duck right up in front of Clara. Their conversation became audible as she and Sally approached.

"But look how cute it is, Clara, it reminds me of you," Jenny said, then she squeezed it so it squeaked in Clara's ear and Clara hit it away with a foul expression, "It's Count Duckula! He's one of you."

"Not funny," Clara said, then she snatched the thing away and dropped it back on the display at the end of the bathroom aisle, where Esther saw it reunite with a clan of about a dozen other vampire-themed rubber ducks. She didn't think they were so cute, though, they were a little creepy. Ironic, too, since vampires and large bodies of water didn't mix. Esther knew Clara had to take an extra-long route to work just to avoid crossing a slim river.

"Sally says being short is for little kids," Esther told the pair of them.

"Well, depends how short you're talking, really, doesn't it?" Clara remarked.

"For the record, I do presently feel like Dorothy in Munchkinland," Sally said.

"You're literally only four inches taller than I am," Esther told her.

"Four inches can make a lot of difference," Clara said. And that comment was so unpleasant, in Esther's opinion at least, that conversation needed to be immediately changed. Preferably, it should be changed to somebody asking why Clara and Jenny were shopping at four o'clock in the afternoon on a Wednesday, since Esther knew Clara was supposed to be working currently. She asked in the end to break the awkward silence, and Clara answered, "Dylan's closed the shop for two days because he says he's getting the cellar renovated. I don't even know what he keeps down there, the books are in a totally different storeroom."

"He doesn't keep anything in it, he hosts Ectociety meet ups there on weekends," Sally explained. Sally didn't go to any Ectociety meet ups as far as Esther was aware, and she also didn't seem to be as good friends with Dylan Danvers as it initially appeared. She never really talked to him – he lived almost as close as Clara did and Esther had never even met him.

"You mean a bunch of weirdos who believe in aliens hang out in a basement together?" Jenny questioned with a very odd note of incredulity.

"The irony in that sentence of yours is killing me," Clara told her, and she smiled. Then Clara returned to talking to Sally and Esther, Sally slouched down with her arms crossed, leaning on the handle of the cart. "Anyway, I don't care what he's up to, but I have important things to do, so it's lucky he's given me the day off."

"When she says 'important things,' she means deleting everything I've recorded off the television," Jenny explained. Clara clenched her jaw and scowled.

"That's because everything you've recorded on the telly consists of _Songs of Praise_ , and one of us can't actually watch or listen to _Songs of Praise_ because religion makes their blood boil," she grumbled.

"Don't take your blasphemy out on me, Clara," Jenny told her. At present, Jenny Harkness was slyly reaching for the rubber duck again, presumably to sneak it into the trolley and annoy Clara with it later. Sally thought their bickering was very funny, but seeing Jenny try to reclaim 'Count Duckula' meant Esther noticed something else entirely – right as Clara asked Jenny how she had any right to talk about Earth religions when she wasn't even from that planet, and Jenny told her she was being 'alienist' – on Jenny's right hand.

"Oh my god, what happened to your arm!?" Esther exclaimed. From halfway down her forearm to just below her fingers, Jenny was wearing a hefty-looking cast, keeping her arm wrapped up tight. In her fingers she'd been awkwardly holding the head of the duck, which Clara noticed, and angrily ordered her to put back down (again.) Jenny's thumb was completely encased in the case, totally immobile.

"Bloody hell," Sally said when she noticed the cast, wrapped up in bright blue bandages. She actually straightened up and stopped leaning on the shopping cart to stare.

"This? It's nothing," Jenny told them dismissively, "I broke my thumb. Sort of. Somebody else broke it, really."

"How, though? And why?" Sally asked.

"I'd really rather not talk about it, all I'll do is advise against visiting Chernobyl any time soon," Jenny informed. She smiled politely, but it wasn't much of a smile. Esther could tell that whatever had happened to her right thumb, she really _didn't_ want to talk about. Clara didn't seem inclined to enlighten them, either.

"That's a shame, because Chernobyl is such a popular tourist trap," Sally commented. Clara thought that was funny. Esther thought it was kind of funny, too.

"If by 'tourist' you mean 'extra-terrestrial,' I'd have to agree," Jenny said. What in the world did _that_ mean? "It's not really the sort of stuff you want to be talking about in Tesco. And besides, we'd best be off, I was going to make dinner and it might take a while. You two don't want to stop by, do you? Today or tomorrow, I'm staying in the village for a while."

"Don't I get a say in this?" Clara questioned, then she added, "Although, I suppose if you _are_ desperate to have her cook for you, you're welcome. She always makes too much."

"I don't know, we had a busy evening of cheese-eating planned, didn't we, Esther?" Sally said.

"If you eat all the cheese, what will you use to ward off the serial killer?" Esther countered. That probably confused Clara and Jenny just as much as the stuff about Jenny's thumb confused she and Sally, and their mutual lack of understanding brought their chatting to an end. They told Clara and Jenny they would 'think about' coming over for dinner in a few hours, but they always seemed to have dinner ridiculously late. Esther wasn't traipsing up the moors in February at eleven o'clock at night when she'd rather be asleep. Sally might, but _she_ wouldn't.

They separated as Jenny and Clara headed towards the checkout and she and Sally towards the bakery. She didn't know how far one had to go until they were out of earshot of a vampire and a Time Lord, but they were looking at muffins by the time they actually started gossiping.

"What do you think she did to her hand?" Esther asked Sally.

"She broke her thumb, didn't you hear her?"

"I mean how."

"Painfully?" she suggested. Esther ignored her, and then Sally got bored of being ignored and answered seriously. "Well I don't know. She said somebody else broke it, so it can't have been anything good. Nobody's ever had a _good_ reason to break someone else's thumb."

"And Chernobyl – who on Earth goes to Chernobyl?"

"She said extra-terrestrials, so clearly not anybody on Earth at all.. Maybe we should go check it out, hmm?"

"Yeah, because we can _totally_ afford plane tickets to Ukraine."

"Go to dinner with them if you're that desperate to know, Esther," Sally said, "Speaking of, _do_ you want to go to dinner?"

"Not really," she admitted, "You know, I broke my ankle when I was fourteen."

"How'd you do that?"

"I tripped," Esther said. Sally waited, as though expecting Esther to say something else. "What?"

"Please, spare me the details, Charles Dickens," she said dryly, picking up a box with over a dozen miniature blueberry muffins in it. Esther would criticise her dietary choices, if it weren't for the fact Esther adored blueberry muffins. Besides, as muffins went, they weren't _so_ bad health-wise.

"Well I _did_ trip!" Esther argued.

"I broke my thumb before as well."

"Uh-huh?" Esther raised her eyebrows, not believing this for a second.

"Yeah, it all happened when I was a little girl, on one of our regular family holidays to Chernobyl. After 1986, we used to go every single summer," she began.

"Were you even born in 1986, Sally?" Esther questioned, and Sally was aghast.

"Of course I was! How young do you think I am? I remember Chernobyl, I remember it vividly. I must have been about five months old, nearly six, even. Just because I'm younger than _you_. You're jealous. Are you going to hurry up and get anything? I didn't plan on spending my day wandering around Tesco, you know," Sally remarked.

"Did you plan on spending your day doing _anything_?"

"I had a busy schedule of annoying you in mind," she said, and Esther pulled a face and picked up a box of snowballs. "What are _those_?"

"Snowballs," Esther told her. Sally looked at them funny. "Don't tell me you've never had snowballs before."

"What is it? It looks like it has dandruff."

"It's, you know, marshmallow fluff, covered with chocolate and then covered with coconut."

"I'm allergic to nuts," she said, and Esther frowned.

"No you're not," she told her. She knew full-well Sally Sparrow wasn't allergic to nuts, "And besides, a coconut isn't a nut, it's a seed, just like a brazil nut," Esther explained, putting them in the cart, hoping Sally didn't object to buying them now just because she didn't know what they were.

" _Please_ , tell me where you learnt such _useful_ information," Sally said drolly, moving on to go and buy bread.

"Do you ever get bored of being sarcastic?"

"Not really."

* * *

"This is ridiculous," Sally complained, sinking down in the passenger seat of the Mini, on Esther's right. It _was_ ridiculous, Esther had to admit. They barely lived a fifteen minute drive away from the store, yet they'd been stuck in traffic on the way home for nearly half an hour. "What could be causing this much traffic in the middle of a village?" Esther didn't know, and she'd asked this about a hundred times already, so she just leant on the steering wheel and stayed silent.

The closer they got to their house, the worse the traffic got. They passed a point then, however – when the cars started moving for just a few seconds – where they saw police cars straight ahead, and a cop diverting the cars somewhere else. They were all having to do awkward three-point turns, and that was probably what most of the hold-up was. She couldn't do a turn and leave, though, because the police were blocking off _their_ street.

"Oh, this isn't good…" Esther mumbled.

"D'you think they've caught the lactose intolerant serial killer?" Sally suggested. Esther ignored her. "They better hurry up with this, I need a wee."

"As always. Thanks for letting me know," Esther muttered grimly.

"You're welcome." They were suddenly the next car in the queue for turning around and going back, but they didn't have anywhere to go. They couldn't even stop by at Clara's, it was the same road that snaked up the moors to her lonely cottage on the hill. Plus, they had ice cream in the trunk that was going to melt. The same cop who'd been telling everybody else to turn back came to tell them to turn back, going to Sally's window. He knocked on it and she rolled it down, letting the brisk, February air into the car. Briefly, he was confused by the switched seats.

"I'm afraid you'll have to turn around," he said. Nothing more.

"We can't turn back, we live over there, at Number Sixteen," Sally said, pointing for him, "What's going on?"

"Can't disclose that information to the public, ma'am," he said. Something bad, then, Esther presumed?

"We don't have anywhere else to go," Esther added. The cop sighed and told them to wait, then he walked off to go and speak to somebody. When he left, they could see what all the fuss seemed to be about. Number Thirteen, on the opposite side of the road, was a great black husk of a house, a smouldering wreck.

"Holy… do you think they're okay?" Sally asked, staring at the wreckage. Smoke wisps curled off broken bits of mortar and furniture, "We've not even been gone for two hours – did all that happen while we were out?"

"I guess so," Esther told her. She didn't answer the first question, mainly because, by the look of all the crime scene tape, the residents were _not_ okay. She didn't actually know who lived there personally, though. She had never been much of a socialite, and she was even less of one when she was living as a supposedly-dead fugitive in the middle of nowhere. The PC returned and then waved them through, thank god, so Esther could awkwardly parallel park in between more police cars.

"I don't see a fire engine," Sally mused, getting out of the car.

"Maybe it already left," Esther told her, "Help me bring the shopping in, it's not like they're going to tell us anything. We'll see it on the news later tonight or tomorrow, probably." But Sally didn't help, she stood and watched the police rush about. When Esther looked at her, though, Sally seemed to be focusing on something in particular about the burnt out house across the road. "Sally?"

"I know that bloke over there," Sally told her, nodding.

"You know someone in the police?" Esther frowned, glancing over. There were a lot of men, so Esther didn't know who she was referring to, "Which one?"

"The only one of them not in a uniform," Sally said. Esther spied him, some average-height guy with sandy brown hair who was just wearing a leather jacket and a t-shirt, "He's a detective inspector, only, I met him in Wales, this time last year. He's from Cardiff, what's he doing _here_?"

"What were you up to in Cardiff?" Esther questioned, "How did you even _get_ to Cardiff?"

"Rented a car. Seemed worth the money at the time, people were getting abducted by Martians. Although, it turned out to be… well, I don't know, but there was a robot dog and these brain jars and all these people getting lobotomised, you'd have to ask Oswin. Unless Elliott knows…" Sally said, watching the guy, this 'Elliott.'

"Will he tell you what's going on over there?"

"Don't know. Probably doesn't remember me," Sally said. Esther thought Sally must be pretty hard to forget, the amount she talked about government conspiracies and the paranormal. Her sarcasm alone was pretty memorable. Then she decided to be _even more_ memorable and shouted, "Oi, DI Elliott," across the street. Elliott looked over then and spotted the pair of them, and thankfully seemed to recognise Sally, who waved. For a fleeting moment Esther didn't want to be associated with her, because she was drawing eyes. Elliott muttered something to the cop he had been speaking to and actually came over, too.

"Should I really be talking to you? I was once told you make a habit of selling classified photographs that threaten national security to tabloids," Elliott said, coming to lean on their garden wall. Sally laughed. He really was Welsh, so it was kind of odd he was mingling with West Yorkshire's finest.

"The tabloids are the only ones who'll take them," she told him with a smile.

"Well _somebody's_ more infamous than I originally thought," Esther remarked. Elliott looked at her then like he hadn't even seen her there. She was still worried about the ice cream in the car thawing out.

"This is Esther," Sally introduced her, "She lives with me. She was just asking me to explain everything that happened in the Cardiff dockyards last year with those brain jars and the lobotomies."

"Classified information, Sally," he told her, and she frowned.

"Classified? I was there," she pointed out, "Just refresh my memory." He smiled and didn't say a word, and Sally pouted at him while Esther stood by, silent observer. Sally looked at her for a moment, thinking. "Well what's going on over the road, then? We know the people who live there, are they alright?" Esther didn't know if Sally really did know their neighbours or if she was lying. Elliott seemed to be thinking about what to tell them.

"Three fatalities, I'm afraid," he finally answered, "Can't tell you anything more than that, it's all classified, sorry."

"Since when did the police classify house fires?" Sally questioned. It did seem like odd procedure.

"The police aren't classifying it, _I'm_ classifying it, I'm not with the police," he said. Something was going on, obviously, something more than a simple, tragic house fire (though, Esther hoped the victims' spirits didn't latch onto her energy and manifest themselves in the bathroom again, she'd had enough of that with Sophia Baker.)

"Who're you with, then?" Sally asked him.

"Special ops, Undercoll," he said.

"Undercoll? What's _that_?" Esther inquired. Then he asked her where she was from. "Virginia. What's Undercoll?"

"Why'd you move over here?"

"Oh, you know, I just… fancied a change of pace, a break from D.C.," she told him. Clearly he was avoiding her question.

"What's your name, again?" he asked, looking at her as though he were studying her. She didn't like it, it was like he recognised her, and considering she was supposed to be dead that didn't bode well.

"I totally forgot!" Sally suddenly exclaimed, "We have ice cream to bring in, don't we? And you have to go pad about in your little crime scene." Esther saw what Sally was trying to do, so she went to unlock the trunk and bring the shopping. It didn't take long for Sally to convince Elliott to leave, then he cast another strange look at Esther as he returned to the crime scene at Number Thirteen.

"The poor family," Esther sighed, looking at the house as she carried in a bag.

"Did you ever even meet them?" Sally questioned her. Esther fumbled with the carrier bag as she unlocked the door and neglected to answer Sally. She hadn't ever met them, whoever lived in there. She just assumed they were a family because Elliott said three people had died. Maybe she'd seen a kid out that way before, but she couldn't be sure. Kids didn't play outside much in winter.

"What was all _that_ about?" Esther asked Sally when they were back in the house. Sally lurked by the window in the kitchen to peer through the thin curtains, "Do you know what Undercoll is? It sounds weird."

"Special ops and classified information sounds weird, too," Sally mused. Esther was still putting things away. "Can't you find out?"

"Find out what?" she asked, sticking the vanilla ice cream in the fridge-freezer where it belonged. Sally was too intrigued to put stuff away, apparently, but for once Esther didn't make a big deal of it. She _had_ paid for it all.

"What this 'Undercoll' thing is. On your computer, you know. Isn't stuff like this what you're supposed to look out for? 'Special ops' is what Torchwood used to call themselves to outsiders, you know," Sally told her. She didn't know that, she had never been a part of Torchwood when it officially existed, but now it really was looking like it was actually their business. Well, it was Esther's business, _she_ was the one who got paid by Adam Mitchell to be a snoop, not Sally. "Can't believe he wouldn't tell me about the brain jars. Those redheads got their brains removed."

"What redheads?" Esther asked absently as she put the milk in the fridge.

"The ones who live on the TARDIS, I don't know their names, it was ages ago."

"But you remember Elliott's name?" Esther frowned.

"Well…" Sally began, then it seemed like she didn't know what to say next about her retention of Elliott's name, "Well you lived there for a bit, who are the gingers? The tall ones?"

"Amy and Donna?" Esther suggested.

"That's them. They have no brains," Sally told her. Vaguely, Esther remembered being told something along those lines during her brief tenure as a temporal astronaut, but she had not asked for explanations. Sally didn't seem to have explanations to give her, either, so she decided to just not bring up this 'brain jar' stuff, though she _was_ curious about how they were alive if it was true. Then again, she didn't really know how _she_ was alive, or Clara Ravenwood, for that matter. "Well? Are you gonna go find out?"

"What, _now_? I'm putting the shopping away," Esther told her.

"Well I'll finish, go turn your computer on. This might be something you're paid to tell whatshisname about," Sally offered, meaning Adam. Esther sighed, but Sally was right, so she relented and trudged away up the stairs. She made sure to take her shoes off and hang up her coat before switching on the computer, though, at about five o'clock that Wednesday afternoon.

The first thing she tried when the desktop booted up was Google, plain and simple, though she came to blows with herself when trying to figure out how 'Undercoll' was spelt. Nothing she tried gleaned any results at all, however, and that in itself was a mystery. How did something get no results? _Nothing_ got no results. It reminded her exactly of when Captain Jack had used a virus to wipe all record of Torchwood from existence. Courtesy of time travel, _she_ had all the old Torchwood files still, and more importantly, access to all their high-end software. Not to mention a few other pieces of software, like a version of Cyborg extensively modified by Oswin Oswald so that it erased the computer's IP address from existence completely, didn't just shroud it in firewalls.

If Undercoll got no results on Google, she would have to resort to something more underhand. But Undercoll also drew a blank in Torchwood's salvaged digital archives. Whatever this thing was, it was either so clandestine Torchwood had never discovered it, or it hadn't existed before 2011. That meant she was going to have to delve into the annals of cybercrime, something she rarely liked doing. She was all for staying on the right side of the law.

It was right when Esther decided on this course of action that Sally Sparrow came into the room, later than anticipated. Though, Esther realised, this was because she had made them both tea. She'd been getting fonder of tea, lately.

"Check it out, I was watching out of the window while the kettle boiled, and I'm pretty sure Elliott has a gun on him," Sally told her, "Which is illegal in this country, in case you're forgetting. We actually have gun control this side of the Atlantic."

"Yeah, yeah. You're talking to me like you think I've actually owned a gun before, Sally. Though that _is_ unnerving if you're right…" she said, "By the way, to the public eye, this thing does not exist, which makes my job a lot harder…" As usual, she went to UNIT first. UNIT's archives were not nearly as well-protected as they liked to think, and they were practically guaranteed to have some kind of information.

And god bless the Unified Intelligence Taskforce, because they did. They just loved to stick their noses in places, she thought – then she thought that she was being a bit of a hypocrite. It wasn't much information, though, in fact it was hardly any at all. It was an official directive that had been issued six months ago to all of the British branch of UNIT's department heads and officers.

"Hey, look at this," she said to Sally, "It says, 'Under the direct instruction of…' Oh my god…"

"What?" Sally asked, Esther staring at the screen.

"I…" she cleared her throat and resumed, "'Under the direct instruction of Queen Elizabeth II, the Unified Intelligence Taskforce is hereby ordered to disengage from the investigation of unexplained and extra-terrestrial phenomenon in in the United Kingdom favour of newly created investigative organisation Undercoll. In light of recent events highlighting UNIT's incapability to deal with these threats to the British public, Undercoll has been created to take over these responsibilities in their place.'"

"That's what Torchwood used to do," Sally pointed out.

"Yeah, maybe the world hasn't been getting on so well without them there. That's what this is, Sally, don't you see? The original Torchwood Institute was created by Queen Victoria in the 1870s, Jack always told me. That's how Torchwood got away with so much, because they were sanctioned by the crown, not the government, so they have to answer to the crown. Just like this 'Undercoll.' It's 'New Torchwood.'"

"Right, so, to be honest, it's not the most surprising thing that they would need to create a new Torchwood, so let's get over that shock and think about why people who investigate aliens have cordoned off the house over the road that just burned down very quickly while we were shopping," Sally said.

"Good point…" Esther said absently, changing her tact completely and googling house fires in the United Kingdom in the last year. Unfortunately, there were a _lot_ of house fires, because people were very irresponsible with chip pans, mostly. Two weeks ago Sally Sparrow had set a tea towel on fire with a chip pan. "It's impossible to narrow this down, we don't know anything about what makes that house fire different to any other."

"Hmm…" Sally said, and neither of them had any ideas for a moment, "You can't hack into Undercoll?"

"Not without knowing where their servers are located, no. They'll have a masked network, it'd take weeks to find physically," Esther sighed.

"What if… well, what if he's trustworthy?" Sally suggested, talking of Elliott.

"Y'know what he is?" Esther said, turning to face Sally, who shrugged and looked at Esther like she was at a loss. "He's cute."

"Is he? I hadn't noticed," Sally said. Blatantly lying.

"Uh-huh? Sure you didn't." Sally paused for a second.

"I thought you didn't even get attracted to anybody, so how can you tell?" Sally questioned, and Esther groaned.

"Literally not how asexuality works, Sally. I think kittens are cute, too, doesn't mean I want to… to do the… you know, the _nasty_ with them. Not like you and Elliott. You'd love to… I hate talking about this, I'm sorry," she apologised to Sally. Sally thought she was funny, getting flustered like that. "Probably oughta figure a way to find out what they're up to, though. Why don't you seduce him?"

"That's a stupid idea. We should kidnap him."

"Okay, well, I think that's a stupider idea, personally. Let's not do anything illegal."

"Right. Got you. Like break out of a high security government facility and live as a criminal, putting a surprisingly gorgeous and generous third party at risk of arrest for harbouring a fugitive," Sally said, nodding as she did.

"…Shut up. And especially shut up about the 'gorgeous' part, weirdo."

"I'll pretend I'm not offended by that."

"And I'll pretend I actually care," Esther said sipping some of her tea, "I still think you seducing him is our best plan."

"Trying to make smart comments doesn't suit you, Esther," Sally said coolly, "And I'll seduce _you_ in a minute if you don't shut up."

"Yeah, well, maybe… your face… doesn't suit you, hmm? Did you think about that, Sally Sparrow?" Esther said, and Sally frowned, "I mean, nothing… your face is okay, I guess."

"Wow, I think my heart just skipped a beat," she said, a deadpan expression on her face.

"It's certainly okay enough to, you know, appeal to a certain aesthetically acceptable young gentleman across the street," Esther said with a smile.

"Stop it! I'm not destroying my dignity by lowering myself to a scheme like that."

"You don't have any dignity, Sally, you haven't had a shower for three days," Esther reminded her, and she opened her mouth to protest and Esther smiled back at her.

"You're a little creep for knowing that. People should call you 'Creepy Drummond.'"

"Gee, thanks. We haven't even solved our problem," Esther said.

"Alright, kidnapping him and shagging him are completely off the table," she said, and Esther gasped.

"When I said 'seduce' I did _not_ mean go that far! I meant… smile, or something. I don't know. Do to him whatever it is you do to Clara that makes her trip over things and walk into doors when you're in the same room," Esther said. Sally really didn't like when Esther brought up the fact Clara had a crush on her, but Esther remained continually surprised that she'd had to point that out. She was probably that world's most un-savvy person when it came to affairs of the heart, and here she was playing Cupid. Kind of. Well, not really.

"Forget about seducing him, okay? Bad idea, out of the question. Why don't you hack his Google?"

"Why don't I _hack his Google_? You know that's total nonsense?" Esther questioned. Sally shrugged. "…So what was that you were saying about him being maybe trustworthy?"

"Well, like I said, he used to work for the normal police in Cardiff, and had a run in with Torchwood and the Doctor. Well, it was just Jack and Gwen. And those gingers. And some blonde girl who _really_ didn't like me. And some other guy. Oh, Oswin too. But, I don't think they hid a lot of stuff from him. The Doctor helped him out with _that_ , so… we pretend like we know the Doctor," Sally told her.

"We do know the Doctor," Esther reminded her, "I had to stay in his bedroom with he and his wife for, like, three days."

"I mean act like we know him better than we actually do," Sally said, "Tell him the truth. About who you are, about everything."

"I'm not doing that, that puts my personal safety at risk, and I'd rather just not find out what happened in the house. I'm not gonna be locked up again, Torchwood never had to take civil liberties or human rights into consideration, so I doubt these guys do, either," Esther said, then she sighed, "Maybe we should just drop it? Just notify the TARDIS crew?"

"Notify them about what? We don't-" their conversation – which was less of a conversation and more of just them arguing with each other – was interrupted by a knock on the door downstairs. A loud knock, too. Perhaps whoever it was had already knocked before and they hadn't heard because they'd been caught up theorising about Sally's ability to seduce Elliott the cop. "I'll get it," Sally volunteered, standing up and taking her tea with her. Esther followed. Sally turned back to her and revealed, "I still need a wee, you know."

"Well why didn't you go for a wee when we got back?" Esther questioned. She was sick of hearing about wee from Sally Sparrow, she never asked.

"Can't be bothered washing my hands right now."

"Gross." Esther lurked on the stairs behind Sally as Sally unlocked the door, the key already sticking out of the lock. Sally had a bad habit for leaving the key in the lock, multiple times Esther had had to phone her to make her come and open the door when she had been stuck outside, unable to let herself in with her own key, always at odd hours of the afternoon when Sally was most likely asleep. Then she complained about Esther waking her up, and Esther told her she just shouldn't have gone to sleep at noon.

Esther was actually surprised to see DI Elliott standing there in the doorway. Sally was surprised, too – she almost spilled her tea. Esther walked a few more steps down so that she could hear properly what they were talking about, she wasn't fond of the idea of hiding away in the shadows of their staircase right after being called 'Creepy Drummond' two seconds ago.

"Sorry, you can't come in, the house is classified," Sally told him straight off, and he laughed, then his laughter stopped and he spied Esther again, who had made up her mind to be obnoxiously cheery and polite for the duration of his visit. She smiled brightly at him.

"Do you know anything about hats?" he asked, mainly Sally.

"Hats..?" she frowned, narrowed her eyes as he nodded hopefully, "Uh… well, they go on your head, for one thing. They come in lots of different varieties."

"You can get those ones with the soda cans on them," Esther said, "And then the straws that come down – god, they're great, I used to have one, but they're kind of hard to clean."

"I always wanted one of those…" Sally mused for a second, then to Elliott, "Why do you ask?"

"You don't know anything about… special hats?"

"You're giving us so much information right now I'm worried you might be endangering national security," Sally told him, crossing her arms, still holding her tea. Esther leant on the wall at the foot of the stairs and tried to remember if the heating was switched on. She didn't know if it was cold because the radiators were off, cold because the door was open, or both. "Although if you fancy it you could always come in and tell us all about state secrets – I did just boil the kettle." This was not a real invitation, but regardless of that, Elliott accepted and pushed his way into the house. Perhaps this was because of a misunderstanding of Sally's perpetual dry humour rather than genuine rudeness, but the fact remained that Esther hadn't had a chance to clean the living room for a few days so Sally had consequently turned the place into a pigsty, overrun by dirty plates and empty DVD cases. Esther didn't know where the DVDs themselves were, but she never found a case with one in it when she was forced to go and put them away since Sally was too lazy to do any cleaning for herself.

"Is there anywhere I can sit?" Elliott asked. So he'd just invited himself into their house – great. This couldn't possibly end terribly, probably with Esther being taken away for medical testing, or something. Locked up yet again.

"The whole world's a chair if you try hard enough," Sally said, only slightly less unnerved by Elliott's intrusion than Esther was, "Did you want tea or coffee?" she offered. Esther felt like telling Sally not to give him anything, _she_ didn't trust him.

"Tea, please. Milk and one sugar," he said, then he showed himself into the living room, and Esther was stuck having to follow him while Sally had to resign herself to the kitchen to hurry up and make him tea. She had a very hard time trying to overcome the urge to tidy Sally's mess – there was no reason why she had to be so disgusting, and it left Esther with a dilemma; she didn't want to live in Sally's dirt, because Sally didn't care, but she also didn't want to clean up after her.

"Sorry about the mess," she apologised on Sally's behalf.

"All of this is your stuff?" he asked.

"Oh, no, none of it," she smiled awkwardly and drank some more tea, holding the mug very tightly. Was she trembling? She tried to ignore it. She could not shake the feeling that Elliott had ulterior motives for coming there, ulterior motives that involved Esther more than they involved any kind of seduction – which was a bit of a relief, she might as well be allergic to all that stuff.

"Why are you wearing gloves indoors?" he inquired. These questions were carefully designed to catch her in a lie, she was convinced. Well, though she was going to have to lie, he would most certainly _not_ catch her. Not if she had anything to do with it. If worse came to worst, she could send out electric shocks from _all_ of her skin, not just her fingers.

"I have a super bad case of eczema. You do _not_ wanna see what my hands look like under these gloves, it's all flaky and yucky. Only way to stop the scratching," she told him. Grossing people out was a sure-fire way to get them to stop asking questions – if somebody told _her_ they had severe eczema, she would most definitely not keep pestering them about it.

"Would've thought that eczema was the least of your worries," he said. _Shoot_ , he definitely knew. Knew she was supposed to be dead, knew who she was. Could this get any worse? She never thought she'd be mad at people for letting their house burn down, and even though she felt terrible for it, in that moment she really did curse their neighbours. Thank god Sally came back then, carrying a mug of tea for Elliott. He smiled at Sally and thanked her. God, he was a snake. Sally didn't trust him, did she? Surely not? "Have you spoken to Captain Jack Harkness recently?"

"Jack?" Esther and Sally both exclaimed. Well, _Esther_ exclaimed. Sally did not exclaim. Sally was very curt and polite. She shot Esther a look for endangering their ruse. Esther was pretty sure they didn't actually have a ruse anymore. She was wondering if she ought to just run out of the door and take her chances, go to Clara's and hide there until the TARDIS could rescue her. Maybe she'd rather stay stuck on that claustrophobic spaceship than live such a risky lifestyle out in the middle of nowhere.

"I suppose that means you both have?" Elliott asked.

"…What's your deal?" Sally questioned him, "Coming in here, what do you want?"

"To ask you why you're living with a girl who died almost five years ago," Elliott said. Yep. He definitely knew who Esther was.

"She pays her rent on time," Sally said. Then she paused. "She pays _my_ rent on time, too." Esther was trying not to visibly freak out. She had to put her tea down because she was definitely at risk of spilling it.

"Yeah, but I called my colleagues, and they say that Esther Drummond – because that's who you are, isn't it? They say that Esther Drummond is still locked up in the Tower of London," he said.

"So what do you want? You're going to take her to UNIT? To your own base? You _do_ have a base, right? You'd be a terrible clandestine organisation if you didn't even have a base. You know if you _do_ try to take Esther, Jack'll be all over you? I don't even like him, but I know that much," Sally threatened. Elliott stared at her, his mouth a little agape.

"Wait, wait, wait – you thought-? You thought I was here to kidnap her?"

"Well what do you expect her to think? _Us_ to think? You come here being weird about this new sect you work for, saying everything is classified? Are you here to try and take Esther and experiment on her, or not?" Sally questioned.

"Nobody said anything about experimenting on me," Esther interrupted, then to Elliott she somewhat pleadingly said, "Please don't experiment on me."

"I'm not here to do any of that!" he argued. His cool demeanour was suddenly shed, and he put his tea down on the floor, "I don't answer to UNIT, and we don't lock people up. You were killed in the line of duty, working for Torchwood, I… I'm here at this crime scene on my own, and I'm stumped. I came to ask for help. Sorry, sorry, I should have… people expect a certain kind of person to show up when they hear 'special ops' and 'classified'. It's bad enough that I'm Welsh out here, it doesn't go over well when I'm trying to get people to listen to me order them around. And I'm not very good at ordering people around anyway."

"I'm confused," Esther told Sally.

"Mmm, me too. I feel like we're missing something. What _is_ Undercoll, detective?"

"I'm not a detective anymore," he said.

"I'm still calling you it."

"It's the replacement for Torchwood, after it got disbanded because of the 456 Crisis. I… it was the stuff in those dockyards, because I met the Doctor, Undercoll is new, they… scouted me. All just because I met him, and Jack, and Gwen Cooper. Made me move to the headquarters in London, there are only six of us, to watch the whole country," Elliott explained. Okay, this wasn't what Esther had been expecting. Elliott was sitting in her armchair, so she was forced to sit down on the sofa, pushing a funky-smelling blanket of Sally's out of her way. Sally sat on the arm next to her. He turned to Esther almost pleadingly, "But _you_ helped stop the Miracle, didn't you? You've _done something_. I haven't done anything. I haven't closed any cases at all. I was only promoted to detective a year ago, then six months later I'm transferred away. Sorry for imposing."

"Uh… apology accepted?" Esther said, a little confused, "…Let me get this straight, you're _not_ here to kidnap me, lock me up and experiment on me?"

"No, but I don't understand how you're alive. Weren't you shot?"

"Yeah, in Buenos Aires. Alien technology brought me back. Struck by lightning."

"She has electric powers, it's so cool," Sally said, "Everybody calls her the Lightning Girl. It's why she has the gloves on." Esther didn't really appreciate Sally's input there. At least nobody was having to seduce Elliott. Who would have guessed at the stuff about things being classified was literally just because he was trying to look cool in front of other cops? In front of them? Or maybe it was all about looking cool in front of Sally Sparrow…

"How are you in two places at once?"

"Time machine," Esther answered. She still wasn't sure how far she trusted him. She'd gotten a lot less trustworthy since being locked up by UNIT, "But I live here so that I can hide, so that people don't find me. I'll have to leave if I'm in danger from you, or this Undercoll."

"I promise you're not, honestly," he said, "Sorry for the scare, really, I am. I'm not used to any of this secrecy."

"That comes as a shock, because you're really good at it," Sally said sarcastically. Esther couldn't tell if she was flirting or not. Esther didn't _care_ if she was flirting or not, but if she _was_ , she wished she would knock it off. She better not invite Elliott for dinner, then Esther would _definitely_ have to accept Clara and Jenny's earlier invitation and invade their privacy to escape. "What did you come to ask for Esther's help with, then?"

"I can speak for myself," Esther argued.

"Yeah, but you're not. Anyway, I'm like, your manager. I should get ten percent."

"Ten percent of what?"

"I don't know," she said, then she turned her gaze back on Elliott to make him answer the question.

"That house that burned down," he said, "It's one of lots."

"Well, there are _lots_ of houses in the UK, I guess it's supposed to be expected."

"The fires have happened all over the world, starting in the Seventies," Elliott explained.

"Then how are they connected?" Esther puzzled, "That must be hundreds of fires, across almost five decades." What kind of mystery had Elliott just brought to their door?

"Not hundreds, just nine, since 1979, starting in Washington D.C.," he said, looking directly at Esther when he said that. Did he think that just because she was from D.C. she had the expertise to help him solve cold arson cases, staggered over forty years? "The only thing the fires have in common is a hat."

"A hat..?" Sally asked incredulously.

"A top hat."

"A top hat..?"

"Hang on, you think a top hat is killing people?" Esther asked, "First of all, that's crazy. Second of all, how do you even know it's the same hat? There are lots of hats in the world." She now understood why Elliott had asked what they knew about hats when he came into the room.

"This hat has left a trail of blood since it surfaced in '79," he argued, "The hat is always the only thing in the whole place not destroyed by the fire, somehow."

"There's this thing called asbestos-" Sally began sardonically.

"Nobody would make a hat out of asbestos, Sally," Esther interrupted.

"It's not made of asbestos, it's a normal hat. Apart from all the death," Elliott said, "And it's the same one, it has initials sewn into the rim, T.M. But nobody knows who 'T.M.' is. It's never been properly investigated for what it is, the local police never realise what they have. Undercoll would never have realised, either, except that hat was locked up in the storage of an evidence locker at Scotland Yard, and it went missing, a month ago. There have been three fires since, all committed by a resident of the home, all without remorse for their own family, the hat getting passed along the next of kin as the only thing to survive the fires."

"So what? Arrest the hat, then," Sally shrugged, "If you think a hat has been killing people for forty years."

"Nobody knows how the hat is connected, nobody's ever put the pieces together except Undercoll, recently, because they're all so disconnected," Elliott said, "But there's always this hat, it always survives, and the MO is always the same. Those fires are suicides, there's always some sort of fuel, something to make sure everything burns properly, and they make sure the hat stays undamaged."

"So go and get this hat then!" Sally told him, getting sick of this. Esther didn't understand how they could genuinely believe a top hat was a murderer, it was the stupidest thing she'd ever heard in her live, including suicidal cows and Thomas Edison's soul-sucking machine.

"Well, I… can't. I can't find it."

"So how do you know it's a case to do with this hat, if there is no hat? And if you're based in London, why were you up here?" Esther inquired, "How did you hear about this fire, with no hat, and connect it?"

"The owner of that house posted a photo of themselves wearing the hat on Facebook two nights ago, going to a fancy dress party," Elliott said. This thing just got stupider and stupider. Esther looked at Sally to see if she was taking this seriously, but she didn't seem to be. Esther couldn't blame her. Maybe Elliott was delusional? "They were wearing that hat, I was sent up here to retrieve it early this morning, but I was too late. The house was burned down by the time my train got in, and there's no hat to be found."

"So maybe it was a totally different hat, and it got destroyed in the fire?" Sally questioned.

"No, there were other photos of it, matching all the others we have, with the embroidered initials. And I already told you the last three pass down the line of the next of kin. The man who owned that house, Bill Cline, was the next of kin of his sister, who was the arsonist in the last fire, fifteen miles north of here," Elliott explained.

"Well neither of us have seen West Yorkshire's Most Wanted Accessory, detective," Sally told him, "And if we do, we'll be careful not to burn our house down."

"You mean you won't help?" he asked. He seemed at a loss for what to do.

"Help with what?" Esther asked, "We'll stay on the lookout for top hats and arsonists?"

"You don't know anything?"

"What? No, of course not, why would I?"

"You used to work for the CIA, then Torchwood," Elliott said. Esther's files they had on her must be a great deal more interesting than she actually was in real life.

"I was IT support!" she argued, "I really don't know anything that could help you." He looked to Sally, and she just shrugged. She felt bad for him, he was clearly struggling to adapt from normal police work to this crazy, paranormal stuff. And they had him investigating an arson hat? Elliott talking to them was just him grasping at straws, covering all his bases. Could she blame him for thinking the supposedly-dead, supposedly-kidnapped ex-Torchwood agent might know something about this ridiculousness?

"Well then… I'd better go. This is all classified," he resumed his 'classified' tact. Esther wondered if anything was really classified at all. He passed his half-full mug of tea to Sally on his way past.

"Bye, then?" Sally called, a little uncertainly. He didn't answer as he let himself out.

Neither of them said anything for a while, Esther still sitting on the sofa, Sally still sitting on its arm. Sally finally cleared her throat and said she would go pour away his undrunk tea. Esther stood up the same time she did and locked the door after Elliott, returning her keys to where she always left them, next to the TV. Then she returned to her usual spot in the armchair Elliott had invaded for half an hour to bombard them with his nonsense.

"…Do you think there's any truth to it?" Sally asked. Sally wasn't as sceptical as Esther, wasn't as quick to shoot ideas down. Her séance last month had been proof enough of that.

"A hat that travels the world burning houses down in its wake? No, of course not," Esther said, "It's paranoia, seeing things that aren't there. Who knows that these Undercoll guys don't hate Elliott? Maybe this is a rookie test, send him to investigate something really stupid and see what he turns up. An initiation type thing."

"Did they have that at the CIA? How _do_ you get a job at the CIA?"

"It's not really so different to getting an ordinary job, you have to do a few interviews, write an application," Esther shrugged.

"But how do they know you won't, I don't know, sell state secrets to terrorists?"

"Because of capital punishment, Sally. Selling CIA secrets to terrorists is treason, you could get the death penalty for it," Esther explained.

"Oh yeah. I forget you have that over there," she said. Esther thought it was weird that Britain _didn't_ have capital punishment. She also thought it was weird how a life sentence in the UK was only twenty-five years. Twenty-five years hadn't been 'life' since before penicillin. "I think Rex had some sort of initiation like that, but it didn't involve any hats or spooky fires. It was probably just a drinking game."

"Maybe Elliott was drunk."

"It's only five o'clock."

"So? He could be an alcoholic. After everything he saw at those docks in Cardiff, with the lobotomies, you never know. Could have lost it," Sally suggested. Esther doubted that Elliott was drunk, or high, or even crazy. He seemed too worried about his job to be crazy.

"Did we ever decide about where we're having dinner?"

"I'm definitely not going to Clara's. I've had enough weirdness already without having to speak to those two as well."

"Wow, I never thought _you'd_ think there was such a thing as too much weirdness. I guess I'll make bolognaise then," Esther decided. Sally looked over.

"For both of us or just for you?"

"Both of us, obviously. You paid for all the groceries, for once, it's only fair," Esther said. Deep down, she knew it wasn't actually fair, because she did way more around the house. If Sally offered to cook bolognaise, she wouldn't turn her down, but Esther didn't actually mind. She was too relieved Sally wasn't making them go out searching lost and found bins or clothes banks for ditched pieces of ritzy headgear to care about who made dinner.


	4. The Mysterious Hat: Part Two

_The Mysterious Hat_

 _-Part Two-_

The following day, a Thursday, Esther didn't see Sally Sparrow at all until she was eating her lunch at noon. She spent the entire morning debating whether or not this hat business was anything to inform Adam Mitchell about. Esther had a real issue when it came to not wanting to intrude on other people and not wanting to call them, she was paranoid that Adam would be busy doing something important or dangerous. Both of which seemed likely. Besides, she was technically paid to be a lookout on behalf of Clara Oswald and her 'echoes', this wasn't anything to do with the crew or her job. She still thought it sounded like a hoax at poor Elliott's expense.

Sally's entrance was entirely unprecedented, however. Esther had thought she was just asleep upstairs, or being quieter than usual in the living room. Truthfully, Esther hadn't gone to look for her, she hadn't needed to. If she had, alarm bells may have started ringing, because she wouldn't have been able to find Sally at all, because Sally wasn't in the house. This Esther only discovered when there were loud knocks at the door that made her jump, and the sound of somebody struggling to get in.

Then, through the letter box, the shout, "Did you lock this door!?" Esther _had_ , indeed, locked that door. She'd come downstairs to find the door unlocked, thinking that it must have just slipped her mind the night before. Apparently Sally had decided to go out somewhere and hadn't taken her key. Well, perhaps she did have her key, because Esther's was still in the lock. She'd been sitting in the kitchen eating her lunch, as she did every day, when the interruption came. She called for Sally to wait a second as she put her sandwich down and hurried over to unlock the front door and let her housemate back in. "Why'd you lock the door while I was out?"

"I didn't know you were out, sorry," Esther said, holding it open for her. Cold air rushed in. It had snowed again in the night, but along the road it had turned to beige slush running into the drains.

"Didn't the fact I wasn't in the house give you a hint?" Sally said, barging past her to get to the kitchen. Barging past Esther was always risky, though – she _would_ undeniably electrocute anybody who touched her. Maybe with the Syphon 2.0 now, it wouldn't be fatal, probably wouldn't even make Sally comatose like had happened to that one guy two years ago, but it wouldn't exactly be pleasant. "In light of recent events, I guess I can find it in my heart to forgive you, though."

"What recent events...?" Esther asked, watching Sally. Sally who immediately went and moved Esther's plate out of her way, instead of just going to the further end of the table. It wasn't a large table or anything, but there was no limit to that woman's laziness. "Hey!" Esther complained, but she went ignored.

"Shush, check this out," Sally was holding something Esther hadn't paid attention to until then, after she had retrieved her half-eaten sandwich from the counter by the sink. Sally plonked it down on the table, a ratty old thing, reminding Esther of a golden retriever bringing a crusty sock as a welcome gift. It was certainly no better than a crusty sock. It was a hat. And there it sat, black and sooty, on their dining table, getting ash everywhere. Esther stared at the hat, lifted her gaze to Sally, went back to staring at the hat again. Sally beamed, impossibly proud of herself, exactly like some kind of obedient, overly-friendly canid. "It's a hat."

"Yeah, I know," Esther said, "What's it doing getting dirt on the table?"

"I found it." She was still smiling.

"Do you want a cookie...?" Esther asked.

"I wouldn't say _no_ to a cookie, if you're offering."

"Uh-huh…"

"It's the hat Elliott was talking about yesterday, look," Sally explained. Esther had already figured that it was that hat – or, at least, that Sally _thought_ it was. She still wasn't convinced the murder-hat actually existed and was anything more than a far-fetched fiction. Sally flipped the top hat so that Esther could see dirty white thread embroidered into the rim, spelling out the initials 'T.M.'

"So call him and tell him to come get it," Esther shrugged, "Can I get back to my sandwich?"

"I can't believe you're not more interested in this!" Sally's face fell.

"It's just a hat," Esther told her.

"It's not _just_ a hat, it's a hat responsible for, like, a dozen serial killings since the 1970s," Sally argued determinedly, "…And I can't call him anyway, because I don't have his phone number. We'll just have to solve this mystery ourselves."

"Okay, Velma. What makes you so sure there even _is_ a mystery?"

"Because the same hat being found at a bunch of arson scenes, the only thing to survive the fire, is weird," Sally said, "Why would all these happy people just burn their houses down? Kill their whole families?" Esther took another bite out of her sandwich and felt a headache coming on, one of those special headaches only Sally Sparrow caused when she started going on about spooky things. Like a serial killing hat. It was even stupider sounding than the suicidal cows – although, in fairness, the suicidal cows had turned out to be legitimate. But this? No way. Sally seemed a little upset that Esther wasn't taking this more seriously, though.

"Well – well where'd you find it? If the cops couldn't?"

"It was windy yesterday, it blew up the road, halfway to Clara's," Sally said.

"Please tell me you went to Clara's and just found it coincidentally, and you weren't out all morning actually looking for this dumb thing?" Esther asked hopefully. She really wanted the former to be true.

"You'll be happy to know that I _was_ just going to Clara's," Sally said, "I mean, I did spend a _bit_ of time looking for it, but that wasn't the reason I went out." Now the question was why Sally had been at Clara Ravenwood's anyway. It was the middle of the day, Clara was most likely not awake, which left Clara's girlfriend as the reason Sally had been out.

"So why were you up that way?"

"Oh, I would have stayed for longer, but Jenny kicked me out when her father showed up unannounced. She called the house earlier this morning to see if we wanted any cookies, because she's baked about two hundred of them, and I said of course we do. And I also forgot to buy teabags yesterday and we're nearly out," about the time Sally mentioned the teabags, she pulled a whole box of the things out of her coat, "so I figured I would borrow some."

"Now I have even more questions than I did before you started answering them," Esther complained, "And what cookies? I see the teabags, but not the cookies."

"I'm not sure you'd want any of them. I got there, and she's telling me she needs to pawn them off on someone because she can't eat them all and Clara refuses. Turns out, she put anchovies in them," Sally explained.

" _What_?"

"Exactly."

"Who does that? _Anchovies_? As in the fish? That go on pizza? In a cookie?"

"Yeah. Anyway, she was just doing whatever it is she does, when her dad showed up."

"Which one?"

"Whichever the one I haven't met is, with the bowtie and the tweed suit," Sally told her. The Eleventh Doctor. "They don't seem to be on very good terms, and she blamed _him_ for the stuff with her thumb, then he started going on about this distress signal. Then she remembered I was there and told me to go away. Well, they weren't her _actual_ words, she _actually_ told me to 'go back to my wife.'"

"Awesome," Esther grumbled.

"So I stole the teabags and ran into this hat blowing down the road on the way home, which actually seems a lot less interesting in comparison to everything else that happened this morning. I didn't bring any of the anchovy cookies, by the way. Lord knows what she's going to feed to them, take them to the pond and feed them to ducks, maybe."

While Sally had explained everything that had happened to her so far that day, which was a whole lot more interesting than Esther's day, she was taking off her coat, throwing it across one of the chairs, then she went about boiling the kettle. A few times Sally had been so used to just boiling the kettle out of habit, she would make herself tea and then realise she didn't even want tea. She'd have barely any recollection of actually making it, and then, after trying to force Esther to drink it (but Sally didn't take any sugar, and Esther couldn't stand to drink anything so bitter, in a likely unwashed mug on top of that) she would generally pour it down the sink. Esther wondered if this was going to be one of those times again. Regardless, she asked if Sally would make her a coffee, adding that it had better be in a _washed_ mug, not just a _rinsed_ one.

"They remind me of each other, though," Sally was saying.

"Who do?" Esther asked, debating whether or not she could really be bothered eating the last shreds of her sandwich crust. In the end she decided that because plenty of mayonnaise had dribbled out onto the bread, by _not_ eating the remains she was missing out on about thirty percent of her whole sandwich filling, and she was a real stickler for getting the most out of everything. If 'everything' consisted of mundane lunches.

"Jenny and the Doctor. You should have seen them arguing – I don't know what it was about, but they were both so stubborn."

"Sounds like you."

"Maybe I'm her long-lost sister."

"Seems kind of unlikely."

"Ever the pessimist, aren't you?" Sally doled out coffee granules. "I asked if I could come with them to investigate the distress signal, but they told me no. Which I think is totally unfair – what is it about me that they won't ever offer me a place on that ship? They offered _you_ one and you turned it down."

"You'd die," Esther told her seriously, "Honest, you'd be dead within a week. And if you weren't dead, you'd be traumatised."

"So? Why would _you_ care so much if I was?" Sally asked, crossing her arms and leaning on the cupboards as the kettle boiled behind her.

"You're my friend," Esther said, "I think. I mean, you make fun of me, like, a _lot_ , but it's in an affectionate way. I hope. Is it?"

"I don't really think about it when I make fun of people. And I didn't know you thought of me as a _friend_ , Esther. Next thing we really _will_ be married if you keep professing your feelings for me like that. I just assumed I was an annoyance you put up with."

"Oh, no, you definitely _are_ an annoyance I put up with too, don't get me wrong," Esther assured her, finally finishing her sandwich right about the town the kettle clicked off its boil and Sally went to pour their respective tea and coffee. "What are you gonna do with that hat, then?"

"Figure out how to contact Undercoll?" she suggested. Seemed like the only sensible thing.

"…Now, I'm not saying I believe in all this serial-killing-arson-hat stuff, but I don't think having that thing here is all that good of an idea," Esther admitted.

"How come you don't believe it?"

"Because it's stupid."

"Oh, come on, there's _loads_ of reasons why a hat might be responsible for a bunch of fatal fires spanning forty years," Sally said, stirring Esther's coffee and then handing her it, careful not to brush her skin and give herself a shock.

"What? Give me one reason."

"A vengeful ghost is attached to it. Ghosts get attached to objects, you know," Sally told her knowingly. She sipped her coffee after blowing on it for a second and thought about this, giving the hat a funny look out of the corner of her eye.

"I don't think there's a ghost attached. It would have latched onto me by now."

"Then maybe it's cursed? It could be magic."

" _Magic_? Magic isn't real."

"There's a lot of evidence to prove that things like witchcraft and voodoo have genuine scientific basis, it works on the same grounds as homeopathic medicine," Sally 'explained.'

"What evidence is that? _Harry Potter_?" she questioned.

"Magic in that type of form is present across the whole planet, in every culture. Stuff like miracles and cure-all herbs, where do you think ideas like that come from if they're completely made up?"

"From coincidental happenings and humanity's desire to experience things more extraordinary than the world they already live in," Esther said.

"You were brought back from the dead and you shoot lightning bolts! You're the most ridiculous sceptic I've ever met, you're like ET saying he doesn't believe in aliens, and _I_ think that this hat is cursed. Unless you offer me a better explanation?" she questioned.

"How about the power of suggestion? Maybe all the alleged 'victims' knew this story about the hat killing people. Suggestion is just as powerful as your homeopathy, and homeopathy is the exact same thing. That's why doctors prescribe placebos, people _think_ they'll get better so they do, all on their own. So people _think_ they're going to burn their house down, and then they do. That, or the whole thing is a load of baloney made up to fool Elliott. It can't exactly be that hard to sew initials into the rim of a top hat and then ditch it," Esther said.

"He said they're based in London. I don't think it's a prank, but if it is, wouldn't they do it down in London rather than sending him all the way up here? For a joke? And besides, they'd have had to send somebody else up first. And with train fares the way they are, it seems like a lot of effort. And _then_ he didn't even _find_ the hat, _I_ did," Sally said, "It's cursed."

"If you're so sure it's cursed then get it out of the house," Esther said. She had to admit, it was freaking her out. It just sat there on their kitchen table, it was like it was… watching her. Then she realised how crazy she sounded, thinking a hat was watching her, and decided that Sally's spooky stories about curses, and to some extent her _own_ ideas about the power of suggestion, were messing with her head. There was no way the hat was cursed. But still, she didn't really want to touch it. Or go near it. At all.

"And what? Let someone who doesn't know its history have it? Let it continue its killing spree?" she said, glaring at it like it was sentient.

"I think you and I are both forgetting that it's a hat. You see what it's doing? Driving us both crazy trying to explain this insanity. It's stitches and fabric."

"If you're so sure it's normal, why don't you put it on?" Sally challenged.

"…No."

"Ah, see?"

"Shut up! I'm not playing this game with you."

"A dozen people are dead, Esther, this isn't a game. Dead at the hands of this evil hat."

"It doesn't even have any hands! You know what? I'm leaving. I'm going back upstairs to carry on doing my job, which does not involve 'evil hats' or witchcraft."

"No, it's just you trying to protect cross-temporal space clones, reporting them time-travelling Frozone," Sally remarked. Involuntarily, Esther laughed at the 'time-travelling Frozone' thing, and decided that she would have to text Adam Mitchell and inform him of this joke when she got back upstairs where her phone was. "I'll try not to burn the house down, then?" Sally called after her as she left.

"That'd be nice of you," Esther replied, going off up the stairs with her coffee, a very eventful luncheon indeed.

When she got back upstairs, she wondered if she ought to try and get Elliott's contact details. Of course, it would help if she knew his surname. She figured she _could_ break into Undercoll if she knew more information about him, she could probably get into his emails and break in that way, through him, but she didn't have that. And she didn't know what she really wanted out of Undercoll. Her best bet would just be to tell Oswin about it, _she_ would be able to do it with a lot less messing around. Esther didn't have the software at her disposal presently.

It didn't seem urgent though. She still couldn't believe there was anything remotely remarkable about this top hat, other than people hearing stories about it and psyching _themselves_ out, causing their _own_ deaths out of paranoia. Stuff like that wasn't exactly unheard of. The kind of people who thought too much about the significance of coincidences. There really appeared to be no limit to the amount of nonsense Sally Sparrow believed in, though. To her, absolutely nothing was outside the realm of possibility. Maybe that was what happened to you when you were stalked by statues that only moved when they couldn't be seen, but then, Esther hadn't completely lost her senses after the Miracle, even in death.

Suffice it to say, Esther didn't try to access Undercoll. And she didn't inform Adam Mitchell of their headgear-based crisis, either, though she _did_ tell him about the Frozone joke. He replied, an hour or so later, that Oswin thought it was funny. Oswin thought everything was funny, though, she had the most levity of anyone Esther had ever met. Even more than Sally, and Sally was incapable of taking anything apart from ghosts, UFOs and now voodoo top hats even slightly seriously.

And then, fatefully, while Esther was supposed to be doing important work, the inevitable happened: she got distracted looking up video reviews of all the video games she had missed out on since her death in 2011. And in five years? Boy, that was a _lot_ of video games. Had she seriously missed the latest _Bioshock_? The latest _Fallout_? The latest _Dragon Age_? _Mass Effect_? The newest _Arkham_ game? _Final Fantasy XIV_? About a billion instalments of _Halo_ and _Call of Duty_? And no way there was there a _DOOM_ reboot coming up. It was like all of her Christmases had come at once, like she was suddenly living in a month of Sundays. And with her doing nothing apart from sitting on her butt all day googling clone conspiracies, it really _did_ feel like a whole lot of Sundays.

Esther was bogged down in a quagmire of new releases, old releases, the fiasco surrounding the cancelation of _Silent Hills_ , the controversial excess of tank gameplay in _Batman: Arkham Knight_. For the two months in which she had been back in the real world (though she did use the term loosely), she had been too distracted by the whole shooting-lightning, being-resurrected, living-with-a-lunatic, being-friends-with-vampires-and-time-travelling-aliens stuff to actually pay attention to the things she used to care about. Her old hobbies. Of course, video game culture had kind of gone out of the window for Esther a little bit when the human race had its stint of being incapable of dying, and then when she was recently back to life she had way more important things to bother with. And _then_ the Unified Intelligence Taskforce didn't let her have consoles or computers when she was being held captive.

She was right in the middle of watching something incredibly important when there was a knock at her bedroom door, and she moved the right side of her over-ear headphones so that she could listen and see if the knock came again or if she had imagined it.

"Are you asleep or something?" Sally called through the door, kicking it.

"No, I had headphones on," Esther said, pausing her video, "Come in, I guess?" Sally did. "What do you want?" She closed the door behind her.

"What are you up to?"

"I'm watching this _Undertale_ review – they've totally flipped the concept of a turn-based role playing game on its head by adding this choice based morality scheme to the combat system. It's a major overhaul of the entire genre," Esther explained. Sally narrowed her eyes.

"I do not understand a word of what you just said," she admitted. Esther took her headphones off and put them on the desk next to her keyboard, "Does you being a girl not make all the other nerds on the internet go wild? Don't they go mental when you play _World of Warcraft_ with them?"

"The guys on the _World of Warcraft_ servers are usually really nice."

"Sorry, you know I was joking about _World of Warcraft_? You actually play that? Isn't it for saddo teenage boys and middle-aged men whose kids hate them because they don't relate?" Sally questioned.

"I thought that's the people conspiracy theories are geared towards?" Esther retaliated.

"They're not theories, they're true." Esther didn't even bother asking which conspiracy theories Sally was actually talking about, she did not want to know. No doubt if she did ask, she'd get another hour long lecture about how the moon landing was fake. Never mind the fact that it wasn't fake. She knew it wasn't fake, because she'd gotten so sickeningly curious she'd figured that the one person who knew if the moon landing was a hoax would be the Doctor, so she had asked Alpha Clara to find out for her. Alpha Clara had replied that she had asked at breakfast, and Martha Jones had said she had watched the moon landing _from the moon_ four times. In fact, Martha had said that they were going to go and see it a fifth time, but then the weeping angels had intervened and left her stuck in the 1960s, and then apparently Martha had said Esther had better just ask Sally about that if she wanted to know more. She had, and Sally had explained some more stuff to do with those DVDs the Doctor had appeared on, but she still refused to acknowledge that Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin had ever actually left the stratosphere.

"Seriously, though, what is it you want?" Esther asked.

"…That hat's freaking me out," Sally confessed.

"So get rid of it," Esther said after sighing, "Burn it in the fireplace – it'd be ironic."

"I don't want to," she said.

"Do you want _me_ to get rid of it?"

"No."

"Did you put it on?"

"No."

"Really?"

"No! Of course I didn't put it on. I told you, it's cursed," Sally reminded her of this 'fact.' This nonsense, more like.

"There won't be anything actually weird or different about it, you've just been told that it's killing people by that guy, and because _he_ believed it, _you_ believe it. Honestly, it'll be an elaborate prank. Might as well just take it to a thrift store," Esther told her.

"I don't trust it."

"It's a hat, Sally, it can't think."

"Germs don't think, either, but you can still contract food poisoning," Sally told her, which somehow made sense. Well, it made sense until Esther remembered that they were talking about a _top hat_.

"What time is it?"

"Almost five o'clock."

" _What_? I've been watching these videos for _four hours_? How did that even happen… jeez… gosh, I should go to the toilet and have something to drink," she said mostly to herself. What a waste of time, but who could blame her? Her job generally didn't seem all that urgent. If there _was_ something urgent, imminent alienation and hostile colonisation of Planet Earth, for instance, it would probably be on the national news. She wouldn't have to be wading through weapons and drug deals on the Dark Web to find out about an outbreak of flying saucer attacks on major cities.

"Have you not found anything interesting, then?"

"I found out that _Uncharted_ concludes in April, _that's_ interesting. I, for one, cannot wait to see the updated graphics and platforming mechanics – although, it would be super cool if they finally made the gunplay seamless," Esther informed.

"I didn't understand that either."

"Well, you're missing out. Why're you loitering around in here?" Esther asked.

"Just wanted to hang out."

"Really? The hat scares you _that much_? You're willing to come here and listen to me tell you about video games?"

"I'm being serious, Esther, there _is_ something weird about it."

"Throw it out! Just dump it in the trash and forget about it."

"I can't, I don't… I don't want to touch it. I moved it into the living room, but then it really started to get to me, like it was watching me, and I don't want to touch it so I can't move it, but I'm not staying down there. And don't you touch it, either."

"Get it on the end of the mop and throw it out of the window," Esther told her.

"…We have a mop?" Sally asked, genuinely shocked.

"Oh my – have you cleaned anything in your entire life _ever_? Yes, we have a mop, it's in the pantry with the other cleaning supplies," Esther said.

"We have other cleaning supplies?"

"Don't trouble yourself with them, you just worry about learning how to wash regularly like everybody else in the world," Esther said.

"I'm perfectly clean! I had a shower two nights ago!" Sally argued vehemently.

"Yeah, so you should have another one tonight. Or every night, even. You know what, you go have a hot shower right now, and I'll go make us both tea, and see if you don't calm down a way about this hat stuff. If you're still worried about it afterwards, you can hang around up here, I'll put a movie on Netflix, or something."

"We have Netflix?"

" _I_ have Netflix."

"What's the email and password?" she asked hopefully.

"I'm not telling you. And it isn't written down or saved in my phone, so don't search my belongings, okay?" Esther pleaded. Sally was mulling over the proposition of a cup of tea and a hot shower.

For once, Sally actually decided to heed Esther's sensible nature, and said fine, she would go and have a shower. Esther said she had best make it a long one, and she proceeded to make some joke about Esther not wanting to know what she would have to do to prolong it. But Esther didn't actually understand what that meant, and she didn't ask, either. No doubt she didn't even want to know.

As soon as she heard the shower running a few minutes later she sighed, irritated at herself for wasting so much time while being simultaneously glad she was getting caught back up with one of her few interests, and got up to go and make the tea she had promised Sally. Downstairs, waiting for the kettle, she leant on the cupboards and thought about that hat. Now Sally had gotten so weird about it, it was starting to play on Esther's mind, too. She wondered who 'T.M.' was, why they had let their hat get away from them. They clearly thought it was important, if they had sewn their initials into it. For a second she wondered if maybe it was some kind of theatre prop, actors were superstitious enough to make up some story about evil and arson. Maybe that hadn't been the original story, maybe it was like Chinese Whispers, getting distorted as the decades rolled by.

Eventually she meandered through into the living room to see it, and was a little unnerved by the fact Sally had put the television on the floor and set the hat on the TV stand. Like she had just been staring at it. Yes, Sally Sparrow was paranoid, she was _very_ paranoid. She thought the government had her phone tapped, that everything was a conspiracy, that 'they' were 'after her.' Esther thought half of that was nothing but talk, but this? This was another level. Even if this was all mind games, they were affecting Sally pretty severely. Who was to say she wouldn't try and burn _their_ house down?

The kettle finished, she heard in the kitchen, and she wondered if perhaps she should lock it up somewhere, or if she should take it to show Jenny Harkness. She was the Doctor's daughter, after all, and she was two centuries old, she must be able to identify if there was something funny about it? Then she remembered that Sally had run into Jenny _and_ her father that morning, they were on bad terms, and they had gone out to investigate something. So she dropped both of those ideas and just went to make tea. The only weird thing Esther noticed about the hat was Sally's behaviour around it, she didn't have any of those same feelings about it watching her. Still, she made sure to close the living room door, which did have a lock, but she didn't know where the key was. Probably lost somewhere.

At least when she returned upstairs she managed to catch the end of the video she had been watching, further putting the hat out of her mind. She just hoped Sally wouldn't do something crazy, like try and burn the house down. Most things Sally Sparrow did were crazy, though, in fairness. Sure, Esther didn't _mind_ jazz music, but she didn't appreciate been woken up to Dean Martin's crooning at two o'clock in the morning on Sally's battered old record player. Had the woman never heard of headphones? If only her birthday was coming up, Esther could get her some without it being kind of rude. But Sally's birthday wasn't for eight more months.

"Have you thrown the hat away?"

Esther jumped and turned around to see Sally skulking about in the doorway.

"You spooked me. And no, I haven't. But don't go look at it, it's not good for you. You're gonna ignore it and go to sleep at an ordinary bedtime and then in the morning you're gonna get rid of it," Esther told her.

"Are you my mother?" she asked sarcastically. Esther didn't dignify that with an answer.

"I made you the tea I promised," she said, smiling.

"Has anybody ever told you you're too nice?" Sally said, coming to sit on the edge of the bed. Sally spent more time on the edge of Esther's bed than Esther did. She took the mug, still plenty warm.

"Lots of people, all the time," Esther assured her, "But how can anybody be _too_ nice?"

"It's a bit suspicious. How do you keep it up? Are you on drugs?"

"No."

"Are you gonna make me watch a rubbish film? Do you have the British Netflix or the American Netflix?" Sally questioned. It was like living with a small child, the amount of questions she got asked.

"American. It's just like being at home, with all of this… trash."

"Can't you just pirate something to watch?" Sally asked her.

"That's illegal!" Esther said, shocked she would suggest such a thing.

"Isn't most of the software you have on this computer illegal?" Sally sipped her tea and tried to seem casual, but there was a definite note of accusation

"Well… well _yeah_ , but I use it for good. And it's not like anybody else could hack into it and find out about this stuff."

"What about Oswin?"

"I… well, okay, I guess Oswin could hack into it…"

"What about Adam?"

"…Sure, I mean, he could probably hack it too, it's mostly his software."

"What about… Stephen Hawking?"

"I don't think computers are really Stephen Hawking's speciality."

"But he talks with that computer."

"Are you really allowed to say that these days?" Esther asked carefully.

"Well he does!" Sally protested.

"Yeah, I know, but it's kind of rude."

"It is not rude, Esther."

"Okay, well, would you, like, go up to Stephen Hawking and be like, 'oi-'"

"Don't do an accent," Sally warned her, so she stopped. A shame, really, she'd totally been practicing her British accent lately. Not that it was coming along very well, she'd never been very good at mimicking accents.

"Would you be like, 'Hey Mr Talks-With-A-Computer-Guy, how's the talking with a computer thing going?'" Esther asked.

"No, probably not, but then that _would_ be rude. I'd say, 'Hey Stephen Hawking, do you know about the black goo that wants to take over the planet?'" Sally told her matter-of-factly. Esther paused and stared at her, trying to decide if she had actually heard the thing about the 'black goo that wants to take over the planet' or if she had maybe imagined it. Sally didn't act like she had said anything out of the ordinary.

"…What, um, what was that thing about the goo…?"

"I was watching this documentary-"

"Oh, god, not another of your 'documentaries.' AKA, 'science-fiction.'"

"Science- _fact_ , actually," Sally remarked.

"That's not actually a thing that exists, you know," Esther said, and Sally scowled at her, so she sighed, "Fine, I'll bite, what happened in _this_ one? It's not another one about the Nazis?"

"What? Now you're denying that the Nazis built UFOs?" she questioned.

"Are you gonna explain the goo?" Esther asked, not wanting to start arguing about the Nazi UFOs. Again. Sally Sparrow's favourite topic was the conspiracy surrounding Operation Paperclip and _Die Glocke_.

"Basically – and this is an indisputable fact, by the way – this meteor crashed to Earth, and MI6 found it, and then their agents found out that inside of the meteor was this black alien goo, that was sentient, and they took it back with them to the MI6 base. Then it learnt about the planet and said it's going to kill all the humans because we're destroying Earth, and it escaped into the sewers and now it lives in the Thames and waits," Sally explained. Was she really _explaining_ , though? There seemed to be an element of, um, ridiculousness to this. Insanity, even. But at least Sally wasn't thinking about the stupid hat in the living room anymore.

"So, what you're saying is, the plot of _The Day the Earth Stood Still_ is going to happen, but instead of Keanu Reeves, it's the Tar Monster from old-school _Scooby-Doo_ that's gonna wipe out mankind?" Esther said in the same serious, concerned tone of voice, a hand on her chin for effect. Sally thought about this for a second.

"Why do you always have to undermine me?"

"I'm not undermining you," Esther muttered, turning back to her computer.

"You're always doing it."

"I think you undermine yourself plenty with these delusions…" she mumbled quietly.

"Oh, what was that?" Sally challenged.

"Nothing."

"Sounded like you maybe said something there?"

"Nope, you're hearing things."

"Thought you might have said I have delusions."

"I think you have delusions about hearing me say you have delusions."

"Oh, I do, do I?"

"I mean, maybe, I don't really… I'm not aware of your… _ideas_ …" Esther continued to mumble. Sally grimaced. Esther feigned clearing her throat to signify a change to the course of the conversation. "Holy… do you see that?"

"I see you hovering over some show called _iZombie_. That's a weird name – is it, like, if iPhones came back from the dead?" Sally questioned.

"I'm not sure Apple would like if iPhones came back from the dead, they'd make less money."

"That's fair enough. You know how capitalists can be."

"It's the girl, I mean, the lead," Esther said.

"What about her?" Sally asked, glancing from the computer screen to Esther, who was staring at Sally with a great deal of urgency, waiting for her to make the connection, "…What?"

"I mean, she – oh, of course, you never met… well that girl there is the _spitting image_ of Jenny's mother. The female Doctor, from the future. Honestly, it's like looking in a mirror."

"A mirror?"

"I mean, a photograph. Not a mirror. Seriously, it could be the same person. Maybe it's some alternate universe stuff going on?" Esther said.

"Or, there's this thing, that we normal people-"

"'We normal people?' Coming from _you_?"

" _That normal people_ ," Sally said quite loudly, shutting her up, "such as myself, call a _coincidence_."

"Maybe. But it's pretty spooky if you ask me. Should I text a picture to Jenny?"

"She's busy fighting with her dad today, though, isn't she?" Sally said, "That can't have ended well."

"…Fine. But it's still weird. Weirder than the black sentient goo, that's for sure."

"You won't be saying that when the black sentient goo takes over your body and makes you into nutrient paste to digest and absorb," Sally said argumentatively, crossing her arms like a child having a huff.

"Jeez, you've really put a lot of thought into this goo-thing, haven't you?"

"I think you should put _The X-Files_ on."

" _What_? You think I'm going to let _you_ watch _that_? YOU? Watch a show about people investigating unexplained, paranormal phenomenon?"

"I _am_ a grown up!" Sally protested.

"Yeah, but you're not a very… _grown-up_ grown up, are you?"

"What's that supposed to mean?"

"It means… that… uh… you… you're… um…"

"I'm waiting, for one thing. Go on. Explain, please," Sally said.

"Well…" Esther continued to make a lot of semi-thoughtful noises, really not being able to find the words to describe quite what she meant. Sally just wasn't the sort of person you trusted around kids, was what she kind of meant. She was a bit like that out-of-touch, borderline alcoholic cliché of an aunt. You would get her over to babysit, and the kids would be traumatised because she told them a ghost was going to kill them in their sleep, or something.

And because of Esther's failure to provide any adequate adjectives, Sally succeeded in making her put _The X-Files_ on. It was like a child convincing their parents to let them stay up an extra hour. Esther was very careful to remind Sally that it was science- _fiction_ , though, not this barmy science- _fact_ she had made up to justify her lunacy. At least it distracted her from the stupid hat, though. Sally spent the entire time pointing out how factually accurate the things going on where, while Esther repeatedly and with an increasing tone of boredom reminded her that it was a television show and it was made up. At one point, Sally grumbled that Mulder would believe her that there was something funny about that hat.

Scully and Mulder were investigating something particularly contrived to do with a suspected rogue artificial intelligence a good while later when Esther found herself dozing off in her chair. She was nearly in the midst of a nap when she got prodded in the side of the head and made to wake up by Sally.

"How are you always so tired?" Sally asked. Esther yawned. Was it getting late?

"How are you always _not_ so tired? You never sleep," Esther said.

"Is there a ghost?" Sally asked urgently, "Is it draining you?"

"There isn't a ghost. But really, though – you don't ever sleep," Esther said. Sally looked at her strangely, like she was confused about something, trying to work something out. "…What?"

"Do you not see those pills in the bathroom cabinet?" Sally questioned. Well that certainly sent a chill through her. What was this about pills?

"Uh… I don't really go in the bathroom cabinet. Why…? What pills?"

"The ones for insomnia," Sally told her.

"You take medication for insomnia!?"

"Well, no, I don't take it. Which is probably what the problem is. I don't see the point, because, they're mainly anti-depressants, and I'm not depressed, and I'm not much into anything that'll change my moods," Sally said, "It's a lot easier to manage when I work freelance, anyway, when I worked in the shop with Larry it was a nightmare. _He's_ the one who made me go to the doctors." Well now a whole lot had been explained all of a sudden, it was a bit like some kind of fog had been lifted from Esther's field of vision.

"But you… you're okay, though?" Esther asked.

"What do you mean?"

"Like, are you alright, in general?"

Sally frowned at her, "Yes. I'm much more used to my insomnia than you are to your electricity, I've had it for a very long time."

"Since the Angels?" Esther suggested uncertainly.

"No, since my parents died. But I don't want to talk about that," Sally said. As Esther had suspected but had always been too polite to ask, Sally's parents weren't in the land of the living anymore. She didn't try to make her talk about it, she didn't know what she would gain from knowing the details, or what Sally would gain from reliving whatever it was that had happened. Sally didn't owe Esther any kind of personal information, anyway, and Esther had no desire to be privy to it. "I think you should watch _Misfits_."

"Which is what, exactly?" she asked, though she was glad for the change of subject.

"Probably much too sophisticated for your simple, American sense of humour to grasp," Sally told her knowingly.

"What do you think we do in the States, just sit around and laugh at fart jokes all day?"

"Something like that," she shrugged.

"Well… well the joke's on you, because I don't even _like_ fart jokes. They're stupid and immature, just like all toilet humour."

"Maybe you're just different to the rest of your, uh, species?"

" _Species_?"

"Are you sure you didn't get deported for being a glitch in the Matrix?"

"You're taking this too far, it doesn't make any sense at all. And why do you want to stop watching this, anyway? Sally Sparrow isn't sick of UFOs, ghosts and conspiracies, is she?" Esther asked her wryly.

"Sally Sparrow prefers when people don't address her in the third person when they're talking to her. She thinks they sound like a knob," Sally said. Esther scowled, and Sally smiled, "Go on, put it on, and allow yourself to be educated in the finer points of British comedy."

* * *

The early hours of Esther's dreams were haunted by harrowingly familiar images of unsuspecting young adults getting superhuman abilities after getting struck by lightning in mysterious circumstances. Never again was she going to take Sally Sparrow's advice on what to watch on Netflix, especially not if it was something that became so oddly personal. Which was weird for a low-budget comedy about young offenders.

Esther was usually a sound sleeper, a _very_ sound sleeper, it came from having to get used to sleeping in a bright-white room on a prison-standard cot; when she was in a comfortable bed in the quiet and the dark, she was out like a light and wouldn't be woken up until daybreak. Most of the time. But not that night. Something woke her up that night, like she was sensing something. For the few seconds of awake-ness before awareness, Esther wondered if this might be what sleepwalking was like, because to her knowledge she had never done that. But, no, she supposed that sleepwalkers weren't supposed to be aware that they were sleepwalking, otherwise they were just… walkers. Or possessed. Something like that.

She figured that, maybe, she needed a drink. She had a sore throat, from mouth-breathing presumably (she was always doing that, it was terrible waking up at eight o'clock and immediately having to go get a glass of milk to sooth it so that she could actually swallow without flinching.) It seemed like a viable option, and there was something bugging her in the back of her mind. Like the feeling of having a word right on the tip of your tongue, or trying to remember what you came into a room to get, there was something _there_. Esther just couldn't get at it.

Drearily, she trudged downstairs, too tired to put on her slippers. It wasn't the desire to get a drink that was bothering her though. No, it was something much more unexplained than that, she realised as she walked into the kitchen at two o'clock to see Sally Sparrow fussing over their ancient gas oven, and the gas hob, the door hanging open and all of the rings switched on. Esther heard the hissing of the flammable gas from the doorway.

She went from being half-asleep and wandering around looking for milk in the dead of night to wide-awake and staring at the surreal scene of her housemate holding a box of matches and wearing that ghastly old top hat on her head. There were very few situations in Esther Drummond's life where she was overcome with the desire to utter a swear word (not one of the _bad_ swear words, but something enough to get her heart racing), but this was most definitely one of them, profanity inspired by sheer weirdness.

"Sally?" Esther asked. Didn't Sally say just a few hours ago that she didn't want to touch that hat? Didn't want it near her? But she had also said that she refused to let Esther throw it away, and that it was watching her, and she thought it was cursed. Now Esther was forced to face a dilemma of principal – dare she stand by her theory of placebos and suggestion when Sally Sparrow was potentially about to commit fatal arson and burn their old Victorian house to the ground? Or ought she to put her vanity aside and just, in the moment, accept that maybe that darn thing _was_ cursed, that there _was_ something funny about it? Most certainly, Sally would not ordinarily burn the house down. And especially not with Esther asleep upstairs, she liked to think. In the two months or so that they had known each other, Esther hadn't detected any pyromania about Sally, she didn't make a fuss about matches or explosions – although, she _was_ quite fond of their open log fire. But considering it was mid-winter, and there was snow on the ground outside, that wasn't too weird.

Then, to add to the surreal spectacle, Sally was ignoring Esther completely.

"Sally? What are you doing? … Sally? _Sally_? … Uh… put the matches down, alright?" she kept pleading, but Sally Sparrow was like a zombie. Esther couldn't try to shake her out of it, either, any attempt to do so would electrocute the woman. And electricity made sparks, and sparks would light the gas building up in the kitchen. Esther was a walking catalyst for hot disaster, much more so than the matches Sally was holding. Those things were like child's play when compared with the 'Lightning Girl' (a moniker she still disliked), who perpetually had the electrical charge of a thunderstorm running through her skin.

In desperation, Esther resorted to taking a cookie out of the packet nearby and throwing it at Sally. It missed. Esther had never had a good arm on her. She threw a second, and this one hit Sally in the arm, and that _finally_ got her attention, got her to stop waiting for the moment in which the kitchen would be so full of gas it would go up like a Fourth of July fireworks display. She turned with a hollow expression towards Esther, and Esther saw that her eyes were open, but they were going haywire. Sally was in a state of REM, in other words, she was dreaming. Sleepwalking. She was not conscious. It could not be the power of suggestion, crude hypnosis, if she was really asleep. It was like, though Esther hated to think it, she was being controlled. But by what? Not that hat, surely?

But what else?

Maybe if she got the top hat off of Sally's head, she would stop this nonsense?

The stench of gas was wafting around her, but her attack on Sally via baked goods had gotten a bit _too much_ of Sally's attention. By which she meant Sally was now lifting the box of matches in a zombie-like, threatening way, the box in one hand, a match in the other, ready to strike. If she struck that match, like she was going to do any second, they would both go up. Esther would have hard time trying to get Sally out of the house without electrocuting her into a coma, or worse. Sally could end up a vegetable, a barbecued vegetable, one who barbecued herself without having any idea what she was doing.

"Just drop the matches," Esther told her coolly. _She_ would be alright; the lightning gave her cells some pretty miraculous healing capabilities – hence why she didn't look like a corpse that had spent four years decomposing in a graveyard in Chevy Chase – but Sally? There at ground zero of their little kitchen-based explosion? It would be a miniature version of the beginning of _inFamous_ , complete with the electrical powers. Kind of. The analogy didn't quite work, being that if Sally was centre of the blast, _she_ would be the one with the electrical abilities – but none of that was important. What was important was that an allegedly cursed top hat was about to murder her housemate. What on Earth had her life even become since Torchwood?

Sally did not drop the matches. She went to strike the one in her hand. It was a split-second decision Esther had to make. She didn't have time to make a lunge, to hope that by brushing Sally's hand to grab her arsonist's instruments she wasn't signing her death warrant, she just had to hope that her aim with her lightning was better than her aim with the cookies, and she wouldn't miss, because she only had one shot. Even with that one shot, she could still end up a man slaughterer, but if she let Sally strike the match then she was _really_ being a man slaughterer. At least if she tried her hand (literally), they were in with a chance.

She wasn't religious, but she felt like praying when she lifted her hand to hold it up high enough to be opposite that hand. She was not in the habit of ever having to shoot anything with lightning, _incredibly hot and dangerous lightning_ , but now thought that maybe she had best start practicing. Just in case something like this ever happened again.

The kitchen lit up vibrant blue when her electrical projectile, a bolt of energy borne from her fingertips, shot across the room, through the gas and the air, for that ratty old accessory on top of Sally's head. Esther succeeded in knocking the hat off, succeeded in seeing Sally's eyes roll back and then watching her fall backwards to the floor. To Esther's great surprise, she also saw that top hat _explode_ , like she had hit something within it, it didn't just end up with a big old hole burned through the side. She couldn't focus on that for long, though, because she had also succeeded in finishing Sally's work for her. It was perhaps the luckiest thing in the world that Esther had come down those stairs before the kitchen was quite flooded with enough gas to burn anything for any length of time, that she had pre-emptively arrived to stop Sally in her burning tracks. There was a burst of fire from the direction of the cooker, a large orange puff of flame in the air, but then the gas burned out and the room was left hot but intact. There was a bang as Sally crashed onto the kitchen tiles. Esther jumped, the kitchen only lit by dim moonlight. It looked a lot darker all of a sudden, with no lightning and fire, as brief as those instances had been.

She dashed to the switch on the wall that turned off the gas flow to the oven completely, then went about closing it and turning the hob off, and switching the light _on_. Then she saw Sally lying on her back on the floor, the hat lying a few feet away. Esther could see her breathing, so she was still very much alive, must have just taken a nasty knock to the back of the head.

"Sorry, Sally," she apologised sheepishly, even though she went unheard. She would apologise again whenever Sally regained consciousness, which would hopefully be soon. Esther slipped briefly into the sitting room to retrieve a cushion from the sofa to stick under Sally's head; she was nowhere near strong enough to do anything so chivalrous as pick her up and move her somewhere more comfortable. She tiptoed over Sally's head to go pick up the hat and examine it. This was the first time she had touched it, and it crackled when she did, in that way objects did when they held electricity she could leech out of them. And this was more than the residue static from her _own_ bolt of lightning.

She turned it over in her hands to examine it, and saw that her bolt had become very condensed and drawn to one particular spot, a very static-y feeling spot, and she dug her fingers into the thin lining of the old top had and dug out something metal. It looked, though it was partially melted and very old, like a computer chip. Some sort of 1970s-style circuitry. So they had both been wrong, it was not power of suggestion _or_ a curse that had made people burn their houses down, that had tried to entice Sally to do the same thing. It was technology. 1970s technology controlling people? Originating in Washington D.C.? Elliott being very interested with Esther's CIA past?

Now she had an idea.

* * *

It was about five AM when Sally graced Esther with her concussed presence, free of tyrannical hats and rubbing the back of her head when she knocked on Esther's door. Esther was deep into research on her computer back upstairs, though she had been checking on Sally at half hour intervals or so. She didn't want to try and wake her up lest she do more damage, but had decided that if Sally didn't wake up by about eight, she would ring up the TARDIS as a last resort and ask some of them to come and take a look.

"You're awake?" Sally asked, very confused, when Esther opened the door.

"Uh-huh," Esther said, her original words lost to a thick yawn. She pulled the door open further and beckoned Sally inside, "Good thing you woke up."

"Yeah, about that, what exactly is going on? I remember being in the living room, and then… why is _that_ here? I told you not to touch it!" Sally exclaimed, seeing the remains of the hat sitting on the carpet by Esther's chair.

"Just calm down, it's not… it's a long story, you should sit, you hit your head pretty hard. Sorry about that, there wasn't much I could do, even if I could have got to you fast enough to try and catch you or something, I might have killed you by accident. Didn't have my gloves on," Esther said. She _did_ have her gloves on now, though. She had needed to put them on so that she could try and take Sally's pulse a couple of times, just to check she hadn't slipped into a coma.

"Why are you up at this time? What are you doing?" Sally asked.

"I said to sit," Esther sat herself when she said that, back in the chair, Sally on the bed. As always. "Long story short, I got woken up by that thing three hours ago and found you wearing it in the kitchen trying to burn the house down, in a state of rapid eye movement. Which, ordinarily, means dreaming, but not…" she interrupted herself with another yawn – gosh, was she not meant to be nocturnal, "…not in this case."

"It's not… it doesn't seem weird anymore…" Sally was staring at it.

"I zapped it off your head and broke it," Esther told her with a slight smile. She was a _little_ proud of herself for her accuracy and heroism, she would admit, "You will not guess what that thing actually is, or who T.M. is. But it's not cursed, and it's not a placebo, either, we were both wrong. T.M. is Dr Thomas Mercer. In all official records, he doesn't exist, he _never_ existed, but I've spent the last three hours looking and I have some _un_ official records, Torchwood records."

"If you found out who 'T.M.' is so fast, why didn't Elliott? And Undercoll? Or Torchwood?" Sally questioned.

"Because the fires are so random nobody's even tried to put it together until now. But they never found the hat, or looked at it. Look at this," Esther said, picking up the big lump of circuitry and showing it to Sally, "That was in the hat, hiding inside the lining. I only found it after I shot it. You're not a big fan of Batman, are you?"

"I'm sorry?" Sally asked. _Definitely_ concussed, and woozy. Probably not best to confuse her.

"Okay, Batman has this minor villain, Jervis Tetch – the Mad Hatter. Lewis Carroll inspired. Before he went totally wacko, he was a neuroscientist who specialised in mind control devices. He controlled people with hats. That's what this thing is – Thomas Mercer's identity was erased by the CIA when Operation Bluebird was shut down in 1973 and the files were ordered to be destroyed. Torchwood was never ordered to destroy them because Torchwood didn't have those files legally, and when they were put into a digital format in the 1990s, nobody thought anything of Thomas Mercer and his work on MKUltra."

"Whoa, whoa, _whoa_ – you're telling me that stupid hat is a genuine, working product of MKUltra, Esther? The CIA's mind control program?" Sally questioned.

"That's exactly what it is. But my guess is this was Mercer's most prized creation, his _magnum opus_ , and he couldn't bear to get rid of it, so it ended up in circulation in Washington D.C. But going by the string of deaths, it doesn't work properly, unless he always intended it to make people preserve it but also burn down their houses. Maybe… maybe it's some kind of assassination device? I really don't know, the Torchwood files are, uh, spotty, since Jack reconstructed them for me… the thing is, it affected you but not me because of my powers."

"But… no, I've read about MKUltra, they didn't do anything like develop hats that could control peoples' minds, they were about hypnosis and torture and LSD."

"Well, a lot of their files were completely destroyed. If nobody involved ever talked about them, who knows what else they might have been looking into? It was a huge program. That's what the hat is. A malfunctioning old mind control device. And where's my thank you for stopping you burning the whole house down?" Esther asked her.

"God, you _must_ be tired, asking for a thank you could almost be considered rude."

"Nice to see you're not too concussed to be sarcastic."

"I'm never too anything to be sarcastic," Sally reminded her. An annoying truth.

"I can go back to sleep if I'm sure you're not dead now," Esther said. She was already going to turn off her computer.

"What? No, I have more things to ask about the hat!" Sally protested.

"Yeah, well, ask them tomorrow, okay? You need painkillers, sleep, and rest. You're lucky I don't call Martha Jones and make her give you a once-over," Esther told her firmly, "And I'm going to burn this thing the first chance I get. Thomas Mercer's invention has caused enough deaths, I think. Best not risk it killing anybody else." Sally was in too much of a state to argue with Esther. She sighed and got carefully to her feet, Esther observing to make sure she didn't fall over.

"Did I really try to burn the house down?"

"Yeah, you had the whole hob on and the oven, just pouring out gas into the kitchen. Good thing this hat's mind control signals – or whatever they're called – woke me up. We might both be dead by now otherwise."

"Then thanks. Thanks for not letting that happen," Sally told her genuinely.

"Don't mention it," Esther smiled, "But take it easy now. And let me get some sleep, we can't all be insomniacs." Sally laughed slightly, but that didn't seem to benefit her head much, because she flinched.

"Night, then. Or, morning… sort off…" Sally drifted away out of the room, closing the door, and Esther went to turn the light out and follow Sally's example of retiring to bed.

As she did, though, and as she lay there bundled up in her warm sheets with the snow outside and the peace and quiet of rural life, she couldn't forget about that hat. It was right there, at the foot of her bed, and Esther just couldn't shake the feeling that it was watching her in the darkness...

 **AN: The reason the concept of a hat that causes mysterious fires and always survives them is such a weird concept for a storyline is because this one has been wish fulfilment and kind of doing a duty to myself. "The Mysterious Hat" is the name of a comic strip I drew in Year 3, when I was probably 7. Not a detailed comic strip, all stick figures (I can't draw) and it only had about nine panels and never had anything to do with the CIA, and actually kind of morbid for a 7 year old, but I just wanted to do a semi-serious and _complete_ iteration of it. This was originally going to be a storyline in 4D12C with Jack and Donna and Martha, I think, or possibly just Martha and Rose, and then it evolved to be one with just Donna, Nine and Oswin because someone asked for that, but I decided to move it to _Spook Watch_ and finally do it (the Donna/Nine/Oswin storyline is still a-go and is Lovecraft-inspired and Cthulhu-based, if the person who suggested that whose username escapes me is reading this author's note.) So, it's weird because I thought of it when I was 7, so be kind.**


	5. The Phantom Locomotive: Part One

_The Phantom Locomotive_

 _-Part One-_

Grey clouds bubbled above a mottled, blue-green sea, creamy streaks of foam lapping against dull rocks. The faux-weather was soft and bleak, as though the very island itself was coated with a kind of frozen sadness, like it was sealed away peacefully in a snow globe. An eroded, mass of stone covered sparsely in light-brown flora sulked on the fringe of the bay, the artificially-generated shore littered with golden-red shipwrecks; hulking, non-existent beasts swept ashore and shredded on the needles out in the ocean.

"' _It's only at night that this place makes any sluggish effort at life. You can see the buoy and the aerial. I've been taking to sleeping through the day in an attempt to resurrect myself. I can feel the last days drawing upon me – there's little point now in-_ '"

"Why are you sitting here in the dark starting at the TV?" Sally Sparrow ripped impolitely through the entire immersive façade, the atmosphere of the video game making Esther Drummond jump and seek, immediately, the pause button, pushing her headphones so that they fell from her ears to rest around her neck. Sally was haggard and pale, riddled with all the visible traces of an almighty hangover, and had dragged one of the musty throws from her bed downstairs with her. The blanket hung to the floor like a slug trail, and she stood in the corner with a questioning expression.

"I'm playing video games." The game hadn't paused properly, and she had missed the end of a valuable audio log she needed to find out the fate of the eponymous character – all thanks to Sally Sparrow creeping around the house. Esther had been so involved in that gorgeously-rendered island in the Outer Hebrides she hadn't noticed Sally's entrance. It reminded her a lot of Hollowmire, if Hollowmire wasn't landlocked. Then again, Britain didn't have the biggest variety of landscapes. It all looked _quite_ similar, unless there were a landmark in the picture. "Have you had a shower?"

"I can't stand up for long enough to have a shower," Sally answered somewhat pitifully. And Esther _did_ pity her, because she was just that sort of sympathetic person who felt bad for Sally in her plight – even if Sally's plight was entirely brought on by Sally herself. Testament to what she had just said, she practically collapsed down onto the sofa and cocooned herself in her blankets. It was about seven o'clock in the evening; she'd been thinking of getting takeout for dinner.

"How are you feeling, then?"

"How about you tell me what it felt like when you were a rotten corpse just freshly plucked out of the ground, and I'll see how much my current situation compares. I wouldn't be surprised if bits of me started falling off, to be honest," she muttered.

"You know this is what happens when you try and outdrink a vampire," Esther told her.

"Don't give me the pompous lecture right now, please, I'll kill myself."

"I'm just saying-"

"Well don't 'just say.' My ears are bleeding." Her ears were not bleeding. Esther hadn't a clue how much Sally had had to drink, and she didn't think Sally had a clue, either. But if she did insist on going to The Mermaid and drinking with Clara Ravenwood, these sorts of things would happen; she would crash through the door at four in the morning and beg Esther to make her a cup of coffee, and nearly fall asleep on the landing. Wash, rinse, repeat. Of course the vampire metabolism was a little too high for Clara to suffer these same adverse effects, and as for Esther? She couldn't get drunk even if she wanted to. It was something to do with the electricity. "What are you playing?"

"Just this game."

"What game?" Sally persisted. She always came and asked Esther what she was playing, and whenever Esther told her, she made some sort of comment. This time was going to be no exception.

"Just this old indie release that came out on consoles super recently called _Dear Esther_ ," she said.

"Called _what_? ' _Dear Esther_ '? You're playing a game about yourself?"

"No! It's not _about_ me, not any more than _The Bell Jar_ is about me, or anything else with a character called Esther," Esther argued, "You just wander around this island and listen to audio logs, basically, that are letters this guy writes to his dead wife."

"Who's called Esther?"

"Yeah."

"So, you play a game where you wander around and some guy says, ' _Dear Esther_ ,' and then, like, tells you things? Like he's speaking to _you_ personally? Directly?" Sally questioned her, amused.

"I'm glad I can serve to cheer you up through your hangover," Esther muttered, "Do you want me to unplug the headphones so you can listen too?" Sally yawned and then lay down on the sofa, facing the TV and curling up. That sofa was drowning in blankets. Esther didn't know where Sally found so many of them – did she really just buy loads? She had never seen her wash any, either, but Sally Sparrow's personal hygiene was a battle she had yet to win. Or make any progress at all with, in all honesty; it was as though she lived with a misleadingly attractive troll, who lured you in with hospitality and then sucker-punched you by leaving dirty socks and other such unmentionables all around shared living spaces.

"Yeah, sure," she mumbled. Esther, switching off her wireless, over-ear headphones, wondered if Sally might be liable to fall asleep again. She took the headphones off and turned the TV volume up, allowing the room to be flooded by the atmospheric sounds of wind and waves, the occasional bout of melodic orchestral music drifting along in the background. The male narrator spoke again when Esther, in-game, wound her way up a sandy path away from a beach covered in shipwrecks, between two rising, stony cliffs.

"' _I had kidney stones, and you visited me in the hospital. After the operation, when I was still half submerged in anaesthetic, your outline and your speech both blurred. Now my stones have grown into an island and made their escape and you have been rendered opaque by the car of a drunk_ ,'" he said drolly, clipping all of the emotion out of his voice. Haggard and grief-stricken. A still, distant gif of clouds making up the backdrop floated along above and the sand gave way to dying grass and weeds, and some spooky music picked up around an enormous, black mineshaft dug into the ground.

"Right. I don't mean to be rude, or anything, but this is kind of incredibly depressing? If I want to see bleak, desolate, rural Britain, I'll walk to the shops," Sally said a while later.

"It's not _that_ depressing," Esther argued. And then another audio log began to play.

"' _For the syphilis, a drunk driver smashing his insides into a pulp as he stumbled these paths, I can only offer my empathy. We are all victims of our age. My disease is the internal combustion engine and the cheap fermentation of yeast_ ,'" he said.

"Would you mind turning it off?" Sally asked her. Esther saw she had her fists clenched.

"What's wrong?" Esther asked, "It's only an hour long – less left now, because I've been playing for-"

"My parents died in a car crash," Sally said. Esther was appalled, entirely at herself, and she hastened to switch the PlayStation 4 off completely, which promptly left them totally in the dark of the living room, in an odd kind of silence now the console's fan wasn't whirring. It was a bitter night in April, and Esther had been toying with the idea of digging some logs out of the cellar and stoking the living room fireplace for most of the evening so far.

"Oh, god – Sally, I'm so sorry," Esther apologised frantically, "You never mentioned – otherwise I would've just turned it off as soon as you came downstairs. Not that you should have to tell me anything if you don't want to, especially not… I'm sorry, I didn't know…"

"It's fine, it's not your fault. It was a pretty visceral description, that's all," Sally said, but she sounded hollow, "It was ten years ago, anyway." Sally never talked about her parents. For almost two months living with her, Esther hadn't even known if they were alive. Then she had found out they were dead, and Esther had not asked about it. Should she have? She didn't think so. It was best not to pry into other peoples' family matters like that. It _had_ been a visceral description, anyway, Sally was right. When she changed the source on the TV the first thing that came up was the back end of an episode of _Couples Come Dine with Me_. Apparently neither she nor Sally had any living relatives – well, aside from Esther's nieces, but they lived in D.C. and thought she was dead.

"I'll go make us some tea. That's exactly what you need, tea," she said. She was practically off coffee by now. Sure, she _liked_ coffee, but she had steadily been going native since she moved to Hollowmire in late December. And now she scarcely drank the stuff, because it was all too bitter for her.

"Thanks," Sally said, but she didn't look at her, her eyes were glassy and fixed on the TV, but she wasn't paying it much attention. _Dammit, Esther_ , she thought to herself, irritated at her own careless insensitivity. She didn't care that, technically, it wasn't much her fault she didn't know how Sally's parents had perished, but she would take the blame regardless and she would try to make up for it.

"Shall I bring up some logs from the basement and light the fire?"

"If you want." Esther did want, so she slipped out of the heavy atmosphere of the living room and filled up the kettle as much as she could without exceeding the safety limit, dished out the teabags and the sugar respectively into their mugs, and picked up the key to the cellar from behind the bread bin where Sally hid it because she was paranoid about her 'doomsday supplies' being stolen.

She switched on the lonely, dim lightbulb in the cold cellar and trudged down the stairs. Their cellar was full of shelves and boxes of supplies. Canned food mostly, dehydrated junk; a great deal of various batteries, and a few mounds of firewood. Only one of these mounds was the one they were allowed to take from, and it was a fresh one bought last week. Esther lugged the whole net bag of logs back up the stairs to dump it in the kitchen, wondering if it might not be better to use coal for the fire instead. Coal was harder to light with electricity, though – wood wasn't.

The kettle still boiling, she returned to Sally's ghastly form in the next room and stuck a generous amount of wood in the fireplace, lighting it with a spark from her fingertips (she did not have her gloves on at present, because she was in the house and hadn't been around any electrifiable persons for most of the day) and propping up the metal fireguard in front. Sally smiled slightly when she left the room again, and she smiled back, then went to find a bottle of milk in the fridge that wasn't out of date. Sally had a bad habit of thinking in-date milk smelled funny and opening a fresh bottle, which gave Esther a hard time trying to figure out which one she was supposed to be using.

Sally was grateful when she returned with hot, beige tea a few minutes later, the fire crackling. It was still so cold to say it was April. Esther was beginning to think that spring had a different meaning in the United Kingdom as opposed to the United States, because it certainly felt much more like winter, and had done for the whole time she had been there. It just wouldn't stop snowing.

"What time did you get home?" Esther inquired.

"Four, maybe?" Sally said unsurely, blowing on her tea a little, "Which isn't _so_ bad." Esther thought it was very bad. Esther had been awoken at eight o'clock by a deliriously drunk Sally trying to make scrambled eggs by mashing up a fried egg into little pieces, and had been very frustrated that it didn't work. She'd been far too gone to say how long she had been out, and so completely wasted she didn't even argue when Esther made her go to bed. Drunk Sally really put the annoyingness of Sober Sally into stark perspective.

"I told you not to go to the pub with her yesterday," Esther reminded her.

"I seriously don't need the lecture. She offered to pay for my drinks, so I said yes, and we don't even go out that often. This was, like, the third time ever," Sally argued. It was the fourth time, and this was quickly growing into a weekly occurrence that could only be detrimental to the mortal one out of Sally and Ravenwood, and Esther didn't understand why the latter couldn't just drag her girlfriend out places instead. So what if Jenny didn't drink? Jenny not drinking could only be a good thing when she was, in terms of sobriety, Clara's rival. Esther sighed and wondered if she should try and tag along next time to try and stop things getting out of hand. They could try and make her drink all they liked, it didn't matter, she did not get intoxicated. It wasn't a state her biology permitted her to be in.

"Well, how about I raise Clara paying for your drinks to me paying for your dinner. Our dinner. Anything you fancy?" Esther asked, and Sally looked her right in the eyes.

With a note of the utmost seriousness, she said, "Esther, I would kill for fish and chips right now. Fish and chips, drenched in vinegar, is exactly what I need." That wasn't takeout, Esther thought to herself. If Esther were going to get fish and chips, she was going to have to walk to the shop herself, and she wasn't too keen on that. If only she could order in from the 'chippy,' as the locals called it (she was getting to be awful, she said crisps instead of chips and chips instead of fries and it was a big old mess in her head), but it didn't do delivery.

How long would it take to walk to the fish and chip shop and back, she wondered? Fifteen minutes, tops. Twenty if it was busy. Hollowmire was a tiny little village, every major shop nestled right in the centre, with about three streets winding down to the market square in the middle, covered in cobblestones. Very rustic. Sally definitely didn't look up to walking anywhere, though. She had worse bags under her eyes than usual, and was swaying. Esther sighed.

"Okay. Okay, sure," she agreed, because she still felt guilty about that _Dear Esther_ debacle with the car crash. If she walked briskly, she could be back before her tea went cold, and she could put it down by the fire for good measure. Plus, now that Sally had suggested fish and chips, she wanted fish and chips.

Sally seemed surprised. "What, really?" she asked, watching Esther stand up.

"Yeah, why not? I'm starving. I'll go for some wholesome seafood," she said, quite sure that it was not remotely wholesome in the slightest, leaving the room in search of shoes. Every day, Esther thought to herself that she really ought to stop bending to Sally Sparrow's impulsive whims. She would quite like to steal the meagre sum of money out of Sally's belongings, but aside from the fact she didn't really think that, even hypothetically, Esther could bring herself to steal, Sally didn't actually have the money. Of course she didn't. Why would anyone ever think to have a job, and earn money?

Not that - she thought somewhat resentfully as she sat on the stairs in the hallway and tried to force her feet into her boots - they really _needed_ the money of a dual income. Not now that Adam Mitchell's charitability had given her a raise. Her job was wholly useless she had realised after the business with Liam Kent. Well, perhaps not. Without Esther, he may not have been caught at all, may have been left to exact his deranged revenge on the cross-temporal 'offspring' of the Doctor's wife until all the Echoes current alive had died at his hands. Surprisingly enough, Esther didn't blame herself. If she blamed herself for the tragedies that happened in her vicinity, she would… well, she would end up like Oswin. Liam Kent had killed those Echoes. A tragic accident 'killed' Rex Matheson. And Sarah Drummond had killed Sarah Drummond.

She stopped herself in the nick of time from asking Sally if she wanted a drink. No doubt Sally would say yes, of course she wanted a drink, and then Esther would kick herself because she had _just_ , off her own back, made Sally a cup of tea, and she couldn't be doing with spending even more money on that darn woman. Because Esther was so generous and Sally was so poor, it was more or less like they shared finances anyway, and she really didn't like that. But, alas, she had been telling Sally Sparrow for more than four months to get a job, and she always got the same response, that she _had_ a job (but being a freelance paranormal photographer definitely was not a job.) _Neither is spying on people on the internet, Esther_ , Sally would tell her.

Esther declared before slipping out of the door that she would only be fifteen minutes. Then she realised she had forgotten her scarf and her special gloves, so she came back, and Sally made a dry comment that fifteen minutes wasn't what it used to be. She left _again_ , realised that this time she had forgotten her _keys_ , but couldn't be bothered listening to another sardonic remark upon her second return and so decided to go on without them. She wouldn't get locked out, and even if she did, she had her phone.

Hollowmire shone, rain puddles making mirage-like patterns in the imperfections in the roads, reflecting an ever-changing ripple of the village back at her in shades of shimmering greys. Moonlight and lamplight blurred the scenery and made the place glisten against the bleak, black moors, and of course there was dull snow, more like slush, shovelled against the sidewalks, blocking the drains. Almost immediately she regretted this trek, and wished she had stayed by the freshly-lit fire with her cup of tea. Gloved hands in her pockets, Esther hunched her shoulders to fight against the chill, wondering if there was some way electricity might create warmth within her veins. If she tried to do something like that, though, she would probably light up, and it would be best not to become a string of human-shaped fairy lights in public, even in a place so odd as Hollowmire.

Beneath the waning moon was the crest of the tallest hill surrounding the village, and from the top of that hill, she knew from an expedition up there with Sally Sparrow who claimed that there was a ghost, the whole village was visible. All of it, a little web, just… nestling there, practically a breathing being of its own. It was an odd thing to take note of, but she had never strayed far from D.C. From the top of the Washington Monument, the city crawled out in every direction, infecting the landscape with suburbs as far as the eye could see. Hollowmire was all awfully surreal by comparison.

She didn't really bump into anybody as she journeyed, and she passed Dylan Danvers' shop and debated swinging by to drop in on Clara Ravenwood, who was working at present, but decided against it. She hadn't met Dylan yet, and wanted to get back to her tea as soon as possible. Plus, Clara would try and persuade her to her buy food too if she dared go into the bookshop. Although, she _did_ have a few books in mind she wanted to read… But no. She walked by the shop. Wondered if Clara might smell her walking past – she was weird like that. She turned her folded, ten pound note over and over in her hand, focusing half on that idle fidget and half on trying not to slip on the ice crystallising the concrete underfoot.

The pungent smell of vinegar sliced the bitter air apart as she rounded a corner and saw the bright lights of _Hollowmire Fish & Chips_, sitting like a maritime jewel at the far end of the high street. She walked towards it, hoping it was warm within, barely registering the funny, circular symbol of the Followers of Oc'thubha, that religious society who ran most of the village. All it meant was that the owners were part of the group, but so were most people, and they were all plenty nice. They gave out free tea and cookies at their meetings anyway; she and Sally had once gone, a few weeks ago, to see what they were all about. Then they all sat around in a circle and stared at a very large and very expensive television set with nothing but ringing static for about half an hour, and afterwards declared that Sally and Esther were not open-minded enough to 'hear his teachings.' She didn't know if that was a bad thing or a good thing, but the custard creams had been nice.

She pushed open the door to the store and was overcome by the heat of the fryers and the people within; two in front of her, one behind the counter. Because of Sally Sparrow's intrinsic laziness, they had a lot of takeaway, and because Sally always refused to go alone to get any, they were regulars. Everyone knew everyone in Hollowmire, and she kind of liked that. She liked that Nick, the owner, waved at her when she came in, and that everybody else turned to smile welcomingly after they heard the soft tinkle of the bell above the door.

Esther lingered there, waiting to order, having to loiter while a fresh batch of chips fizzled away in one of the fryers, smelling fatty batter and salt on the air. Just standing in that shop was probably making her cholesterol levels go through the roof. Although, she wasn't sure her cholesterol levels did much of anything those days; the lightning, those fifty-thousand volts of electricity whizzing underneath her skin, kept her in peak physical condition. Apart from the fact that she was still technically dead. No, Sally Sparrow was the one who was going to die young due to her horribly unhealthy lifestyle.

"How's that woman of yours?" Nick asked her when she ordered, as she waited for him to wrap the food in half a dozen layers of greasy, white paper.

"Woman?" she puzzled.

"Girlfriend?"

"No, no, we're not – you're thinking of somebody else," Esther said. To say that everyone knew she and Sally, everyone sure did a good job of getting them confused with Clara Ravenwood and Jenny Harkness on a regular basis. Jenny was around the village so often she might as well live there. She was with Clara all night, then when Clara came to work she was in the habit of hanging around theirs, for company. "We're not the lesbians, they live on the hill, in that creepy, lonely house. I live at Number Sixteen, Lunar Terrace. Not on the hill. I'm actually asexual." Nick frowned.

"A-what?"

"…Never mind…" she mumbled, grabbing two plastic forks from the polystyrene cup on the counter. She didn't need the plastic forks, they had real forks at home, but she was fidgeting, growing a little uneasy. And not just uneasy after coming under the shopkeeper's scrutiny, either. A different kind of uneasy. A _spooky_ kind. Esther handed a ten pound note to Nick, took her change and then took the two parcels in her gloved hands, making to leave, one other person waiting in line behind her.

The chill of the outdoors was even harsher after the heat of the chip shop, even greater than the heat in her own home. The village seemed even colder and even damper than it had done before. A _lot_ colder. She found herself shivering, in fact, overcome by a constricting sense of iciness. Probably just because of the clash between the inside of the shop and outside, though, she assumed. And because of the residual sense of awkwardness she always got when she had to talk about her sexuality to strangers. It wasn't really any of their business. In fact, it wasn't any of _anyone's_ business.

The streetlamps flickered ahead of her and she stopped walking. If it was just one, it would be the bulb. But it was a few of them, at least three, and the odd thing was that Esther didn't detect any issue with the central grid, and she was _very_ in tune with those sorts of issues. Power outages, and the like. Anybody else may have ignored it, but not the fabled Lightning Girl. Not the Lightning Girl who heard an odd kind of rumbling, with an origin she couldn't place. Her mind immediately leapt to thunder, but there weren't nearly enough clouds in the sky for it to be thunder, and again – if there had been lightning in the sky to cause it, she would have noticed. It may have even struck her (it often did, to minimal effect.)

Esther froze, the funny noise grew, the lights around her started to go out, leaving the street with only the moon to illuminate it. She was alone, as well, and balanced the two portions of fish and chips in one arm while digging around in her pocket for her phone with the other. She was going to call Sally and ask if there was a power cut, not seeing any lights visible in the buildings around her. Then she saw something even more unnerving than the darkness, she saw that her phone had no signal. That was impossible. It had been modified by the Doctor. It couldn't have no signal, and certainly not right in the middle of the village.

The rumbling exploded into deafening white noise and lights so bright she might have been punched by a corporeal kaleidoscope tore apart the world, and she was pushed back by an intangible force and fell down into the street, the fish and chip wrappers landing on the wet pavement by her side. She had been knocked off her feet by something impossible, something ripping through the middle of Hollowmire, through the buildings, through the fountain in the centre of the square with the inconvenient little roundabout twisting around it. This beast didn't care about the roundabout or the houses, it blasted straight through them, accompanied by a chugging sound. A _familiar_ chugging sound, and other noises like rattles and machinery and the rhythmic, fast clinking of wheels.

Her brain caught up in her eyes and she realised that she was looking at a train, a bright, vivid _train_ , glowing, blue wisps of something residual trailing off into the sky. It was so blinding and cacophonous that she became numb to the world she had just been occupying, overcome with the sight of this monstrous machine, tearing apart the… the… where had the houses gone? The buildings? Everything was black and bleak, but she didn't see any of the streetlamps or the shops or the cobbled streets or even the fountain (and she liked that fountain, it was pretty.) Nothing was visible in the dim glow of the new moon hanging in the sky, and–

But wait. The new moon had been last week. She knew that because they had a lunar calendar in the kitchen, since Sally believed wholly in some supernatural significance of the phases of the moon. So what _was_ Esther Drummond seeing? What sort of illusion could be so vivid?

Having a brainstorm, Esther made a grab for her cell, which she had dropped on the ground next to her. It still didn't have any signal, but it _did_ have a camera, and she fumbled with her damp gloves for a few seconds in order to unlock it and bring the camera up. She barely managed to capture a snap of this phantasm, an ethereal remnant of industrialisation shattering the countryside with glowing, spectral smoke pumping along, polluting, behind it.

And like that, it was gone, vanished from before her eyes and her phone screen. The cars stopped rushing by, one after the other, windows spilling out ghostly light onto the puddles, the last one sucking itself into the landscape and the hill nearby. Like a flash of lightning in the sky, everything flooded back, the vision disappeared, the houses returned, the streetlamps emitted their orange, comforting glow again. Esther was panting and staring at the space where it had been, her coat getting damp from the floor she was still lying on. She had dropped her phone next to her, and saw that she had full bars again, like she always did. Whatever she had seen must have only lasted for a split-second, if that.

She heard the tinkling bell above the fish and chip shop and saw the solitary customer who had been behind her, a woman who worked in the post office, step out, and frown at her. Their eyes met for a few seconds.

"Are you alright?" she called. Esther looked away, frowned. _Was_ she alright? She didn't have a clue; she was still overcome by her own ludicrous imaginings. The woman walked towards her and Esther finally regained herself enough to grab her phone up off the ground and scramble to her feet, hastening to pick up the fallen packets of food when she did. "Excuse me?"

"I'm fine," Esther called, stumbling as she made to leave, to get away and get back to Sally as soon as possible.

"You don't look fine. Why were you sitting on the floor?"

"I wasn't – I wasn't sitting on the floor, okay? I was just… never mind, it doesn't matter," Esther said, trying to get away, foiled by her own politeness (yet again.) She tripped as she tried to cross the street, coming down off the sidewalk, her ankle rolling so that she nearly fell over.

"Are you _sure_ you're-"

"I'm FINE!" she said a bit more aggressively than she intended, biting her lip in regret, but then the woman stopped talking and Esther was gone, hastening away down the winding roads of Hollowmire in an attempt to get back home, still thinking over what she had seen. That was the least of her worries though, it turned out, because she was so worked up about what she had witnessed that she lost control of her 'abilities' a smidgen. It didn't matter that her hands were gloved, because the electricity was finding other ways to release itself.

As Esther speed-walked down the road, pale blue sparks started flying off her like she was a human tesla coil. Which she was, really, but that didn't make it any less weird that her veins were flashing through various shocking shades of indigo. That caused her to panic even more than what she had seen, the fact that somebody else might see _her_ , might see her throwing out bolts of lightning like they were going out of fashion, might see her eyes light up, might see her accidentally make every lightbulb on the street explode or drain the national grid of power for a few minutes while becoming a walking, talking freak-show. Things continued to progress from there, she continued to stumble around, probably looking like a drunk, working herself up to the point where she was suddenly overcome by a stabbing stitch and went to collapse, feeling as though she were losing her mind, into a garden wall.

But she didn't fall into the garden wall, she fell into nothing, and then felt like she was flying for a nanosecond until being spat out into warmth and onto what felt like a rug. And somebody screamed. She didn't know where she was.

"Esther, you're on fire!"

"What?"

"Fire! Your coat! Get up!" she was being yelled at, and very dazedly she lifted her head up from the floor to see that, yes, bits of her clothes were smoking, glowing faintly red. Esther struggled to her feet, dragging off her coat and throwing it onto the floor to stamp the sparks out.

Only then, spying the fallen paper parcels of food, dirtied and singed, on the rug at her feet, did she have a chance to figure out what the hell had just happened. One moment she was outside falling over the place shooting sparks out of her skin, the next she was exhausted and sprawled out on the floor of a dark room with a pleasant fire in one corner. She only realised she was standing in her own living room when she glanced up into Sally Sparrow's face, who was halfway towards sitting on the back of the sofa she had pulled up her feet that far to get away from Esther. She was staring at her. Esther was at a loss for words.

"What the hell just happened?" Sally asked her. Esther said nothing. She hadn't a clue. "You came out of the TV. Shot out of it, like… like a lightning ball." Esther looked behind her and saw the TV was now dark and switched off. She put her fingers to her temples and thought. "It was crazy!" Sally resumed, "I've never seen anything like it, I thought the telly exploded and then all this electricity sort of, _made_ you, and you were lying there, it-"

"Electrical transmutation…" she interrupted.

"What?"

"Or, transportation. Livewire can do it."

"Who?"

"From DC comics. She's like… living electricity. She can change into it, and travel through cables and power lines," Esther explained.

"Is that what you just did?" Sally asked, awestruck, still keeping her distance. Probably for the best.

"It doesn't matter, not important," Esther said.

"How did you do that?"

"I don't know! I wasn't trying to! I was freaking out!"

"Freaking out about what…? What's happened? You look sweaty," Sally (rudely) pointed out. Esther scowled.

"I saw something, this thing, this – I don't know, I don't know what I saw," she said, speaking very quickly and animatedly with her hands flailing all over the place, "I was walking, just walking, and this, this _thing_ , it appeared, and I don't know – it was blue, sort of, glowing, huge, went through the buildings, and it was loud, _super_ loud, and-"

"Esther."

"-don't think I've ever seen anything like it, oh my god, and the smoke! It looked like steam, it was nearly white, and the moon-"

" _Esther_."

"-the lights! All of them went out, no signal on my phone, then this thing – out of nowhere, it-"

"Esther!" Sally shouted. Esther stopped.

"Yeah?"

"I have no idea what you're saying, your accent goes all slurry when you speak that fast."

"My accent is not slurry!"

"All American accents sound slurry, like you're too lazy to pronounce your vowels properly," Sally said. Esther was offended, and was about to complain when Sally interrupted her again, "I just have one question, though, one very important question."

"What?"

"Did you get the fish and chips?"

"The fish and chips!? The fish and chips, Sally!?" Esther exclaimed, "I've had a… an _experience_ , or something, okay, and you're more bothered about your darn fish and chips!?"

"Well you're not doing a very good job of explaining this 'experience,' and I'd rather listen to it over food since I'm starving. And your yelling isn't doing my hangover any good."

"Your _hangover_!?"

"Fish and chips!" Sally reiterated. Esther scowled, then stooped down to pick up the sullied, paper packages from the rug where she had dropped them after miraculously managing to pull herself through the actual electrical wires and out through their television. She handed one of them to Sally at random. "Thank you."

"They've been on the floor."

"So?"

"The outside floor." Sally shrugged.

"Couldn't care less."

"Ew."

"Continue, then?" Sally prompted, "You were just in the middle of telling me about your sexual awakening?"

"My _what_!? I have not… I… pfft…" Esther, affronted, scoffed, trailing behind Sally into the kitchen as she went to fetch the salt and vinegar. "Shut up."

"There, there. I'm sure you'll go through puberty one day. You're only thirty-five."

"This is important!" Esther exclaimed, more annoyed than she usually was by Sally Sparrow's levity and the fact she was purposely trying to get under her skin, "I saw something!"

"I gathered that much," Sally said dryly, putting down the fish and chips as though she finally sensed that Esther was genuinely bothered by this, that maybe, for once, she oughtn't just make fun of her. "Fine. Okay. What? What did you see? Take deep breaths."

"I left the shop, okay? I had the fish and chips, and then… the lights started going out, the streetlamps, and there was this sound like rumbling, then out of nowhere was this…" she stopped.

"This…?" Sally prompted.

"…Train."

"Train?"

"Yeah. It looked like a train. It came out of nowhere, I… I took a picture! On my phone! Hang on, I'll be right back," she said, dropping her food on the kitchen table and going to fish through the pockets of her smouldering coat lying in front of the fireplace to pull out her phone, unlocking it as she came back through, Sally Sparrow waiting. She hadn't had a chance to look at the picture yet, but showed it triumphantly to Sally. "See?" she said, holding her phone landscape ways. Sally leant forwards and squinted.

"This is a rubbish photo," she said eventually, and Esther's face fell and she turned her phone to examine it for herself. It was just an over-exposed, blueish blur, against a black background, the thing itself so bright it rendered everything else invisible. "The contrast is way off, did you have the flash turned on?"

"Did I-!? I don't know! I was panicking!"

"You didn't even centre the shot proper-"

"Sally!"

Sally stopped what she was saying and sighed, "You say this is a train?"

"Yeah! It sounded like a train, looked like a train, but…"

"But it's glowing?" she said, frowning at the photo.

"Well it _was_ glowing. Sort of… blue. A little. And the moon – the moon tonight is waning, see?" Esther marched over to point at the calendar, "But when the train was there, it was a new moon, I swear. And I lost all the signal on my phone, and that never happens, because the Doctor modified my phone when I was on the TARDIS," Esther said, pacing around the room, still using her hands to speak. She wasn't very hungry anymore, but Sally was picking absently at her chips in their wrappings, sitting idly by on the countertop next to her. She still looked a mess. Sally held out her hand so that Esther would give her the phone, which Esther did. "Do you believe me?" Esther asked unsurely, and Sally looked up, surprised.

"What? Me? Do I believe you saw a ghost train?"

"I never said it was a-"

"Esther, I… this is _me_. Spooky Sally. And you took a photo of… something. Maybe I _can_ think of about fifteen ways to debunk this photograph off the top of my head, but of course I believe you," Sally said, "You obviously saw something, and it obviously scared you so much you turned into actual, living electricity and travelled through the _actual wires_ to get back home." Esther was relieved. She had been legitimately worried about what Sally might think if she told her about this incident, in the brief few minutes it had been since it had happened. But of course, Sally was right; she needn't have worried.

"But it doesn't make sense. People being ghosts is one thing, _that_ … has scientific basis," she admitted, with some difficulty, "But a train? Trains aren't alive, they don't have… _souls_. So how could they be ghosts?" Sally mulled this over, but didn't seem to come up with an answer, either. Not very comforting.

"Would have been a bit helpful if you took a better photo," Sally said eventually. Esther grimaced. "What? This is my only area of expertise, I _am_ a paranormal photographer. Let me be snobby about it."

"Oh, you're a paranormal photographer, are you? And here's me thinking you were a layabout."

"Oi! I _am_ a paranormal photographer!"

"Really?"

"Yes!"

"Show me a picture."

"Of what?"

"Something paranormal."

"…Paranormal like… define ' _paranormal_?'"

"A ghost."

"No."

"Why not?" Esther pressed, and Sally faltered. "Is it because you don't have any?"

"Of course I have pictures of ghosts, Esther," she tutted.

"Then show me one."

"I don't need to prove anything to you."

"You don't need to prove that you actually have a proper job?"

"It _is_ a proper job, I don't claim unemployment benefits."

"Maybe not from the government, but you do from _me_."

"I don't need to show you a picture of a ghost – of which I have many, _many_ pictures you're just not worthy enough to set your eyes upon – because I already have proof of the undead existing living under my roof," Sally said pointedly. Again with the ' _my_ roof.' It wasn't either of their roofs. And Esther paid _all_ the rent. Sally finally gave Esther her phone back. "I'll just get one of your selfies."

"Hey!" Sally smirked. "I don't even have any selfies."

"You do, I went through your phone yesterday."

"Stop going through my phone!" Esther ordered, going red with both anger and embarrassment. Sally stopped making fun of her then and, munching chips, resigned herself to thought, leaning against the kitchen cabinets. "What?" Esther asked eventually.

"You know this area has a lot of coal?" Sally said abruptly.

"Yeah, it has old mines that have been closed for decades."

"No, no, Hollowmire has a lot of weird history," Sally said, leaving her food alone and wiping her greasy hand on her pyjamas, walked past Esther. But when she walked past Esther, she jumped, "Ow! Did you just touch me?"

"What?"

"I got a shock in my arm," Sally complained.

"No," Esther answered truthfully, "It'll be residual from the… power line thing."

"Cable jumping," she said, "Call it cable jumping. It sounds cool. Anyway, there's a reason I moved here, it's… well, it's spooky, alright? Come on." Sally nearly grabbed Esther's arm to pull her along, but thought better off it after her shock a moment ago. She must be overcharged. It would dissipate into the air eventually, like static, Sally perhaps getting a few more sharp twinges from leftover electricity every now and then. Sally Sparrow probably suffered more from the side-effects of Esther's abilities than Esther herself, truth be told.

Sally, engrossed in her thoughts, led them up the two flights of stairs all the way to her bedroom at the top of the house, in the attic. As always, the room was a pigsty, and the faint aroma of mould hung in the air – though Sally was immune to this smell by now. Esther got a whiff of it and hoped there was some direly important reason she had to be dragged up there, Sally navigating her way through her own mess and junk on the carpet to get to one of her many, crooked bookshelves full of disordered nick-nacks, tomes, and vinyls. It was one of said tomes which she now retrieved, Esther staying as close to the exit and the stairs as possible.

"It's so gross in here," Esther couldn't help but comment, staring around. It looked more like a nest than a bedroom, for some trollish, fairy-tale monster. She half-expected Sally to ask her a riddle before she entered.

"Nobody says you have to live with me."

"Actually, they do. I have to stay where I can be monitored. And so do you. You're a liability."

"A liability to what?"

"I don't know, their secrecy?" Esther shrugged, 'they' being the TARDIS crew.

"And they're very secret when they wander around shooting fireballs and hunting aliens in a randomly materialising blue spaceship, are they?" Sally challenged, and Esther had no answer for her in that regard. "You could always go live with Clara. You know Jenny can't stand dirt, the two of you are kindred spirits." Sally talked absently as she flicked through the pages of this large, leather-bound thing she had dragged off her shelf.

"I'm not living with a couple. You and James Elliott are bad enough."

"Oi!" Sally objected, glancing up from the heavy book. Esther was laughing. "James Elliott lives in London."

"Doesn't stop you texting him and asking _me_ for advice on what to put," Esther retorted. It was true, it was a daily occurrence where Elliott would try to text Sally and Sally would have to find a new, ingenious way of rebuffing him. Didn't that guy know how to take a hint?

" _He_ texts _me_. And shut up. I'm trying to find a chapter about your bloody ghost train here, alright?" she snapped. She _hated_ talking about Elliott. There were few things Esther had found which she could use to annoy Sally right back, but Elliott was one of them, and boy did she bring him up a _lot_.

It was a very weird looking book, to say it was a history book. Even to say it was a collection of ghost sightings, it was still a bit… _too_ creepy, with its cursive title embossed in shiny silver calligraphy onto the faded, black leather: _Hollowmire: A Supernatural History_. It was a very small village, how did it constitute a book that large to compile all its urban myths within?

"Where did you get that from?"

"Dylan," Sally answered, "He _does_ own a bookshop."

"Who wrote it?"

"Uh, anonymous."

" _Anonymous_?"

"Yeah."

"That's creepy," Esther said. Sally smiled slightly.

"Yep." Of course it was creepy. It being creepy was probably the reason why she had bought it. "I thought Hollowmire didn't exist, you know. I had this book when Dylan and I still lived in London – he didn't live there for very long, it was too expensive for his poor, Northern brain to handle – and I thought this whole place was some kind of story. Ah-ha. Here it is: _The Night Flyer_ , a sleeper train. I knew I'd heard something like this."

"Something like what?"

"Well god knows what you've done to make a train that disappeared mysteriously on the Fallon Viaduct in 1854 re-materialise," Sally said, "It's in here as a case of missing people, not as a ghost train. Until now, that is. You're a lightning rod for the supernatural."

"I'm a lightning rod full-stop. How does a whole train just vanish? Unless somebody did a _Back to the Future III_ in rural England a hundred and thirty years before Marty McFly was even contrived?"

"No idea. There used to be a train line that ran through the village – it was a station originally, way smaller, but people started moving here to get jobs in the mine until the mine closed in 1897," Sally was saying, taking the blanket off her shoulders and dropping it carelessly on the floor, "The viaduct collapsed in the 1920s because it wasn't structurally sound and it was deemed a better – by which I mean _cheaper_ – option to just close the whole line rather than keep it running. It only went from Leeds to Carlisle."

"And you think _I_ did this?" Esther asked.

"Turn around, I'm gonna get dressed."

"Dressed why?" She did turn around, though, to face the dark passage back down to the first floor landing.

"Obviously so we can go investigate the enormous ghost train you saw go through the middle of the village," Sally said, "Which is, incidentally, exactly where the old train tracks used to run until they were built over by the memorial fountain and the cenotaph."

"But ghosts drain me," Esther began, still looking away, going to lean on the doorframe, "I'm not drained. If the ghost of a person appearing is enough to make me sleep for fifteen hours, an entire train could leave me for dead. Plus, it was like… there was a woman there, afterwards, but I don't think she saw it. And the moon changed, I told you, the moon was different, like I was in a whole other place. I couldn't see any of the buildings, either, and if they were built _after_ the viaduct collapsed… what if we're overcomplicating it? What if it's nothing more than a simple rift in time? Maybe the train just went straight through one of those Doors and continued its journey in some other universe? Some other time?"

"'Some other time' implies it's going to reappear."

"It _did_ reappear."

"Properly reappear, I mean. Considering it didn't destroy half the village, I don't think that's what happened. And the moon thing _is_ weird… I doubt it, though. Jenny would have figured it out by now if there was a rift in space and time up the road from her girlfriend's house – and you'd assume that Oswin would have scouted this entire place before they set her sister up here." Sally was making some fair points. "So, nobody else saw it, except you, but it wasn't imaginary because you took a photograph… not that I'd think it was imaginary if you _didn't_ take a photo, especially not when the photo is so terrible _anyway_."

"Thank you for your confidence in me," she muttered. She thought she heard Sally fall over, trying to put her pants on, probably. "What are you trying to say?"

"That you went somewhere else. Or you were in two places at once. Trains don't just cease to exist – if it's gone, it has to have gone _somewhere_. Maybe that's where you were?" Sally suggested. As it was, Esther didn't think they had nearly enough information to start legitimately speculating about what in the world she had seen while she went to pick up their dinner. Sally declared, finally, that she was dressed, and she left that large volume of Hollowmire's spooky history behind on her perpetually unmade bed, closing the door to her room as they left.

Esther had to go and pick up her coat from the floor of the living room, casting a longing look at her mug of warm tea still sitting by the fire. God, she'd give anything to just stay in and finish it. But they couldn't. She had seen something, and if it was this train which had mysteriously vanished, the _Night Flyer_ , that meant there were a whole lot of people on board. People in need of rescuing, perhaps. Anything they could do, even if that anything was just calling the TARDIS crew down to figure it all out, they had a duty to, as human beings.

She pulled on her coat and found Sally sitting on the steps trying to get her shoes on, a draft coming in underneath the front door. They really ought to do something about that. Then again, they really ought to do something about a lot of things, like the dozen or so leaks in the roof of the attic (half of which was Sally's bedroom, the other half of which was a damp-infested 'storage space' pigeons occasionally lurked in), or the dodgy old gas oven.

"Why now, though?" Esther asked her.

"Huh?"

"I've walked up and down that street a hundred times, Sally. Why, all of a sudden, do I see a ghost train?" Esther questioned her.

"I don't know, why are you asking me?"

"Because…" she faltered, "I don't know – because you're clever? Because you usually figure out answers to these sorts of questions?"

"You're clever as well," Sally said, really struggling to get her shoe on properly.

"We don't think about things in the same way."

"Well, I don't know. If we're here, and the train is… _there_ , then… maybe it's cable jumping. Like a phone, and _you're_ the connection, you're in between, like you're in these metaphorical cables," Sally said, standing up to stamp her foot on the ground to get her shoe on now. It worked, though. "How _did_ you do that, by the way?" Esther shrugged. "What did it feel like?"

"Like how I imagine a fish feels when you catch it and wind in the line," she said bitterly, "Only instead of travelling through water, it was through a television." This time, she remembered to go and grab her keys from where she had left them in the bowl in the kitchen, complete with their nerdy keyrings and keepsakes.

On their walk, Sally just pressed Esther for every little detail of the 'ghost train,' but she could barely even recall what she had seen. It had only been for a few seconds, after all; the thing had rushed her off her feet and left her dazed and paying more attention to the emptiness around her and the strange moon above. It had been very bright and kind of blue, definitely didn't look like a real train. The pair of them were at a loss.

It barely took five minutes to make it back to the centre of the village, with the fountain, and Esther didn't really like how tense she was standing there, like she was waiting for the mechanical beast to show itself again. She felt as though she was channelling the feelings of everybody who had lived long enough ago to see the industrial revolution rip apart the countryside. How had those first people who had seen trains felt? These machines invading the moors and the rustic hills with smog and soot and smoke?

"I don't know what you're expecting to find," Esther said, Sally poking around at the ground after Esther had pointed out exactly where the 'train' had been.

"Any kind of residue."

"Residue?"

"Ectoplasm."

" _Ectoplasm_?"

"Well what do _you_ think we should do?" Sally challenged her. She hesitated for too long. "Exactly."

"We could follow the tracks?" Esther suggested, "They're metal, they conduct electricity… they haven't dismantled the whole tracks, have they?"

"I don't know where the tracks are," Sally said. Esther sighed, and then Sally apparently got a brain storm and stood up from where she had been crouching by the fountain, shining her torch on the glistening cobblestones, "Except… the Fallon Viaduct is still there. Mostly. It'll definitely still have tracks on it. If you think tracks might help, uh… something? Help you… cable jump again?"

"Is that really what we're calling it? _Cable jumping_?"

"Yes."

"Then fine. Viaduct it is, especially if you say that's where the train vanished from. If you try and push me off for a joke, I _will_ bring a bolt of lightning down onto you, mark my words."

"Well. You won't, though."

"I will."

"Nah."

"I will!"

"Nope."

"I totally will. You'll see."

"Uh-huh."

It was just more of their usually bickering conversation as they walked through Hollowmire, ending up off the beaten track and having to trudge through thin mud to get to the top of the _very_ steep hill where the viaduct began, crossing over a grassy valley of the moors, all red and brown brick and falling to pieces. You couldn't normally see it from the village itself, it was hidden behind the hill.

"It's weird," Esther began, interrupting one of their pointless arguments with a subject change.

"What is?"

"That I'm actually getting used to following you around while you investigate this stuff," she grumbled.

"Following me? It's both of us," Sally said, "You're in denial. And denial is the first stage of successful paranormal investigation. We should start a detective agency – _Sparrow & Drummond Private Supernatural Investigators_." Then she sighed. "Reminds me of Kathy." Esther didn't ask when Sally mentioned Kathy Nightingale. Talking about Kathy, she had learnt, was a stone's throw from talking about Larry, and Sally _hated_ talking about Larry. "Don't say you're not intrigued – it's a _ghost train_ , Esther. A real-life ghost train."

"Yeah, yeah. Maybe James Elliott could tell us a thing or two about ghost trains. You never know what Undercoll might have buried."

"You're literally _paid_ to know what Undercoll might have buried."

"You should call him."

"Shut up, or I'll trip you. And stop acting like I force you to come and look into things with me," Sally said, "It's interesting and you know it. You know what the Doctor's like – nobody who has a run in with him, or Torchwood, for that matter, ever looks at the world the same way. You could never do an ordinary job now." Annoyingly enough, that was true, this life really _did_ taint everybody it came into contact with. Plus, Esther thought a lot of companies made it a policy of not hiring undead, illegal immigrants to work for them, so she really was short on job opportunities.

"Ugh," Esther muttered.

"What?"

"I was just thinking."

"About?"

"How irritatingly similar we are to Lister and Rimmer in _Red Dwarf_." Sally laughed. "What's bad is that _I'm_ Rimmer in that analogy…" They climbed the crest of the hill and were faced with what they had been looking for: rusty, overgrown train tracks leading down onto the viaduct itself.

"This viaduct is haunted, you know," Sally said, "Allegedly. Let me know if you see any ghosts."

"Haunted why?"

"Because people jump off it, obviously," Sally shrugged, "Every couple of years there's a nasty case of suicide up here." Esther only half-listened to that, going to carefully walk out onto the little outcrop of brick viaduct that was left, standing in between the tracks. Nothing happened, though. Should she see if electrifying them would help? "You should see if electrifying them would help." Esther nearly scoffed out loud, Sally walking over to stand next to her.

This was their best, and only, plan of action, so with a somewhat defeated sigh Esther pulled her special gloves off and stowed them in her pockets. Sally took a few steps back, closer to the broken off edge of the haunted Fallon Viaduct.

"Do you think I can reach both ends?"

"Maybe if you take one of your boots and your socks off and use your foot?" Sally suggested, and Esther hoped she was joking. She turned and gave her an appalled look. "What?"

"…I don't know how to conduct electricity out of my feet," Esther admitted eventually. Sure, by this point, she could shoot lightning out of her palms and fingers, but her feet? She'd never even tried. Why would she ever need to shoot lightning out of her feet?

"Then what's the point of you?" Sally questioned. Esther glared at her and crouched down.

She could reach both edges, luckily, even though she _did_ have to stretch quite a bit because (being only five-foot-one) she didn't have a particularly grand arm-span. Still in possession of the abundance of electricity she had picked up 'cable jumping' earlier, she decided what better way to get rid of it than to pump it into old railroad tracks? So that was what she did.

Four months ago, with Sally Sparrow watching her, she would have felt like a sideshow attraction. Now Sally could not care less about Esther doing this or that with her electricity, she was too used to it. Too used to the fuse box in their house breaking every time Esther was in a bad mood, or too used to the microwave exploding (though that had only happened the once, and she had bought a new one the very same day.) Lightning streamed down her skin, following the pattern of her veins, and out of her fingertips into the metal. The tracks lit up vibrant blue both ways, electricity shooting off into the darkness away from them at one end and off into the oblivion of the broken viaduct at the other, sparks flying out over the brickwork.

In retrospect, Esther didn't know if the fact this trick actually _worked_ was a good thing or a bad thing. Never, when she used to get asked in school what she thought she would be doing in her future, did she think that summoning a ghost train out of thin air on a haunted, English viaduct would make the cut. Again, the monster exploded into existence, along with its discordant chugging and jarring steam-spitting piston. There was the ghost train, glowing and semi-translucent, the _Night Flyer_ that had disappeared on this very viaduct in 1854, the infernal thing hurtling straight towards them. And they were both too dumbstruck and too close to the fatal fall at the edge of the viaduct to escape.

 **AN: I actually finished this last night, on Halloween, but just could not be bothered proofreading it at midnight. But I _said_ I would update _Spook Watch_ by Halloween, so I'm only a day late.**


	6. The Phantom Locomotive: Part Two

_The Phantom Locomotive_

 _-Part Two-_

 _Congratulations_ , Esther Drummond thought doggedly to herself, _now you can add getting hit by a train to your list of life experiences_. Along with other such vivid memories like dying slowly from a gut-shot and then limping around Arlington National Cemetery with her fingernails falling off and her teeth rotting away. But if dying and then waking up in a thunderstorm and climbing out of your own grave was jarring, it didn't have anything on what it had been like to get hit by the speeding _Night Flyer_ , a metal monster which had hurtled towards them at sixty miles an hour and left them, perched on the crumbling edge of the Fallon Viaduct, with nowhere to run. Quite honestly, Esther knew what it was like to die, and had braced herself in those final few seconds for the crushing void of non-existence to return to her and take away her second chance at life as cruelly as it had done her first. But perhaps more surprising than being sucked into an ethereal no-space by a bloated, glowing ghost train that had come out of nowhere was the fact that where she found herself was _not_ an ethereal no-space; Esther now felt as though she was on a train, which ironically was the last thing she had expected to happen. She could hear the pistons on the wheels and faintly smell metal and coalsmoke, and most importantly felt like she was lying on a floor which was shivering underneath her. Then somebody kicked her in the back.

" _Esther_ ," they hissed, "Get off the floor." They kicked her again before she had a chance to respond, and then the entire train jerked and made her bounce. It was this which finally gave her enough awareness of her surroundings to think about how many germs there probably were on the floor of a train, and it was sheer disgust which motivated Esther to push herself up onto her knees so that she could look around. She was in a booth with two plush, velvet benches on either side taking up the entire walls, deep purple in colour. There were three exterior windows, moderately sized and next to one another, frosted over but still letting in light from the glaring full moon outside. And on one of the benches was Sally Sparrow, who had apparently been luckier in the crash-landing and had managed to snag a comfier spot, at least in comparison to Esther. Sally watched her shakily get to her feet and sit down on the opposite bench.

"Come on, then," Esther prompted her when she didn't say anything, just stared, clearly quite dazed by what had happened, "I know you're dying to explain everything."

"This is the train, Est," Sally said eagerly, a rather manic grin spreading across her face and making her eyes light up in a way they rarely did, "The _Night Flyer_ , 1854. We're _in_ 1854."

"That seems highly implausible."

"Implausible!? In what way!?"

"In the way that… that's crazy," Esther said, because when she was put on the spot she could not actually think of any legitimate reason to undermine Sally's theory. Mainly because they were indisputably on a train and the train looked very old. "Maybe I'm hallucinating. Maybe I'm dead again."

"And what? This is the afterlife? It's a pretty rubbish afterlife."

"Maybe it's the train that takes you _to_ the afterlife. Like in _Casper_ , you know, in the 1997 one. When he gets thrown off the ghost train at the beginning."

"Right, and that's somehow more believable than what I said? Seriously, I think you get off on disagreeing with me. Just admit that I'm obviously right."

"I wouldn't say _obviously_ …" her eyes trailed away to the icy window and she was nearly surprised to see across the moors to where the village was nestled, almost invisible if not for the moonlight above. "Where's the lake?"

"This is _1854_ , how many times! The lake doesn't exist yet, it won't exist until Oc'thubha's meteor crashes out there and creates it," Sally said. "Why is it always so hard for you to accept these things?"

"Why is it so easy for you? Do you ever think you're a bit gullible?"

"Better than being boring."

"I'll believe it when I see it."

"We're on the bloody train!"

"But this doesn't make sense. If this train was a ghost then I'd have passed out by now because it would be draining me," Esther began saying, looking away from the window and back at Sally, who was going to get in a mood soon, she could tell. "But I'm not drained. In fact, I don't even feel a disconnection from the power grid."

"Clearly there's a much bigger mystery at play. Why did the _Night Flyer_ vanish in the first place? How did we get on it now? What's it all got to do with your magical abilities? And _where_ exactly are we? Because this train doesn't exist in 2016 and it doesn't exist in 1854, and it's never been sighted in any of the intermediating years. And if you consider all of _that_ , then-" A young woman rapped her knuckles on the window of their compartment door, interrupting Sally mid-flow. When she had their attention, the woman – dressed in typical Victorian get-up, complete with bonnet and bustle – entered without invitation, opening the door a smidge and just poking her head through.

"I say, would you mind awfully keeping the noise down? We can very nearly hear every word in the next one along."

"…Alright," said Sally uneasily, after pausing. The woman smiled somewhat fakely and made to leave, satisfied she had quelled the ruckus, "Hold on just a moment," Sally got up off the bench and wobbled as the train moved; it was quite a bumpy ride, "Could you tell me how long you've been on this train for?"

"Only a handful of hours," the girl answered, confused, "We left for Carlisle earlier this evening."

"So you don't feel like you've been trapped in an inescapable limbo of non-existence and stagnation for a hundred and sixty-two years?" The woman scoffed and slammed the door in Sally's face. "I thought Victorians are supposed to be polite?" she said to Esther. Esther shrugged. She didn't know anything about how Victorians were supposed to be. Sally came and sat back down on the bench, again lifting her muddy boots so that they were getting muck all over the velvet upholstery. "We need to have a look around this train."

"A look for what?"

"You know. Answers. It's how investigations work."

"I have a better idea."

"Which is what?"

"Just call the TARDIS and let them come and sort it all out."

"You mean give up?"

"Give _what_ up, exactly?" Esther asked exasperatedly.

"The mystery!"

"It's not giving up, it's just that I want to go home. I haven't had anything to eat yet and it's cold here. So if we just call them up then I think things will…" Esther had to eat her words. She reached a hand into her coat pocket to retrieve her cell phone, and that was the point when things really took a turn for the worse. Instead of her phone she found a charred and deformed lump of metal, glass and plastic, cracked and burned out completely from the inside. Seeing this, Sally scrambled to retrieve her own device, and found hers in the same sorry state as Esther's.

"We really _are_ on our own…" Sally didn't like that. She was all for forgoing calling somebody out for help when the option was there, but when they were left abandoned and ill-equipped it struck a genuine nerve with her. The unshakable Sally Sparrow was, for once, worried. Probably about them getting trapped in train-limbo for eternity. "What if we're stuck here forever? With just each other for company?"

"How is that different to every day of our lives?"

"There's always Jenny and Clara in Hollowmire."

"We're still _in_ Hollowmire. And I'm sure if we go missing they'll look for us. They'll search our house and find that book with the _Night Flyer_ page bookmarked, canvass the area until the woman who saw me freak out about the train comes forward, etcetera. Although, I'm beginning to agree with you that investigating the train might be the best thing to do now…"

"You? Agree with me? That'll be the day."

"Today's that day. You must have some zany theories already, hit me," Esther said, leaning forward in her chair.

"I'm trying to work out a few theories on what to do about my phone."

"Your phone is an iPhone 3GS, Sal. Maybe it's about time you upgraded."

"Maybe it's about time _you_ worked out that I haven't got any money. Do you think whatshisface will buy me a new phone? You know, the boy you play games with all the time."

"I don't think you should take advantage of Adam's generosity."

"I bet Clara would get me a phone if I got off with her."

"I don't think you should take advantage of her promiscuity."

" _Someone_ must be able to get me a new mobile…"

"I'm surprised you haven't asked me. Or is your plan to whine so much I give up and buy you one to get you to shut up?" Esther asked. "Because I won't do that. Not when you should have insurance. Isn't that thing a contract phone? When was it due for an upgrade?"

Sally laughed a little coldly, "Ha! I'm honoured you think my credit rating is good enough to get a contract phone. This is Larry's mum's old phone she gave me because she got tired of it being hard to get in touch with me when I went wandering off."

"Wandering off?" Esther inquired carefully.

"When I couldn't sleep, in London, I'd go for walks. Get lost. Well, not get lost, I always knew where I was, but I ended up a lot further away than I intended, and didn't have a phone for a long time because I lost my really old one and never got another."

"You don't go for walks here?"

"No, I don't want to get lost out on the moors or anything. Plus… it was because I didn't really like… my life. At that point. I like it more now. I only live with you and I don't really ever want to 'escape' like I used to," she confessed. Esther got the feeling she was seeing some private areas of Sally Sparrow's history which were little discussed, and did not press for further details. Besides, they were in rather dire straits, being stuck on a doomed train which had been going to nowhere for a century and a half. Taking a look around the train was really their best, and only, option.

"You think we ought to go see if we can find out what's going on with this ghost train, then?" Esther suggested.

"Yeah, good idea. _My_ idea, technically, but still. I'll let you take some of the credit." It was when they both went to get up that something extraordinary happened. Esther routinely touched the metal of the wall surrounding the window, still with her special gloves on, but when her fingertips touched the window frame she witnessed the entire compartment glow for a split-second, like looking into the flash of a camera lens. She jerked her hand away as soon as this happened like she had been burned. "What was that? Esther?"

"Uh… I don't know."

"You must have done something."

"I just touched the wall!"

"Did it hurt?"

"No."

"Then do it again," Sally implored, getting overexcited. Esther looked at her hand and then at the wall, and very tentatively did as Sally bade, brushing her hand against it as lightly as possible. Again, the compartment lit up, but this time Esther did not move and so they could see the startling effect in all of its glory. Vibrant electricity spread across the four walls and around the edges of the glass, drawn to the wood like lightning to a tree. But it wasn't jumping out, it was more like touching a plasma orb and tracing indigo shapes in the sparks with your finger; it looked pretty, but was ultimately harmless.

"There wasn't anything remotely electric involving railways until the 1880s at least," said Esther quietly, watching it flow around the corners and the cracks, "Trains should just about be getting gas lamps installed on them, since gas became widespread in Britain in the 1860s. Over a thousand gasworks in this country back then, actually."

"Seriously, why do you know that?"

"But the first electrical generator was built in the 1830s." Esther ignored her question.

"Clearly there's _something_ electrical here, apart from you. Otherwise you'd have a fainting fit."

"Insensitively put, but probably true." Sally smiled, proud of her little joke.

"And I'll bet that whatever's on here making that kind of power probably has something to do with the train ceasing to exist – until the Lightning Girl came along to lure it back out of its liminal hiding spot, that is. In my professional opinion, the first place we should investigate is the dining car, because I'm starving, after you stopped me from eating the fish and chips you brought back." Sally returned to the door to open it.

"They landed in a puddle of rainwater outside."

"Chip shop chips are _always_ a little bit soggy."

"I really worry about how sterile and hygienic food preparation is in this era," Esther said.

"And _I_ worry about your hypochondria one day resulting in you starving to death. Now come on." She opened the door and held it for Esther, who was left with no choice but to follow her out into their queer locale.

"I'm not a hypochondriac," Esther mumbled, closing the door carefully behind them.

"You clean your special gloves with antibacterial wipes twice a day," said Sally.

"So?"

"You have a first aid kit."

"That's just sensible."

"You floss your teeth."

"Wait – you _don't_ floss your teeth!?" Esther exclaimed.

"Real people don't floss."

"Am I not a real person?"

"Well, you shoot lightning, you were brought back from the dead, and you're thirty-five and you've never slept with anybody – so from where I'm standing, no. You're not real."

"Jeez, thanks for completely invalidating my existence."

Sally flashed her a grin, "You're welcome." Esther grimaced and stopped talking. She couldn't believe that Sally Sparrow didn't floss. It made her wonder if Sally was telling the truth about lots of people neglecting their dental hygiene like that. She almost made a move to send a text to the group chat and ask Jenny and Clara about how they looked after their mouths, until she remembered her phone was shot. She didn't know _how_ she was going to be able to afford another one.

It was very awkward trying to navigate through the train. They were surrounded at almost all times on all sides by people looking nosily out of their windows, and they weren't exactly dressed for the trip. Neither of them had a single hope of convincing anybody that they were also Victorians, and she hoped that they wouldn't get questioned too much about it. Hopefully Sally would be able to quickly come up with something to say if the circumstance arose; Esther had never been good at thinking on her feet.

"Wait – how do we know if we're heading to the front of the train or the back?" Esther asked in a whisper, pausing in the corridor.

"Well… if we reach the back, we'll just turn around and go the other way," Sally shrugged, "But also because when you look outside you can see which way the train is moving. Haven't you been on a train before?"

"Sure I have. We've got the Metro in D.C., you know."

"Why would I know? I've never been to Washington." It sounded like there was a storm brewing outside, which frankly caused Esther to be unnerved. She didn't fancy the idea of being on any kind of train with a large storm outside, especially not an unusually conductive Victorian one. It was also icy cold with no proper central heating, and she wrapped her arms tightly around herself to keep warm. And to avoid touching the walls. The _Night Flyer_ thundered along the iron tracks, with its passengers completely oblivious to the unknown place they were trapped in.

"Okay then, Sal. What do you know about ghost trains?"

"I thought you were never going to ask, but I'm glad you did, because I know a few brilliant ones. But I suppose the most poignant one is the Tay Bridge disaster. It was on this bridge up in Scotland built to make the crossing over the Firth of Forth, which is this estuary next to the North Sea. In 1879 the bridge broke underneath the weight of a passenger train because the architect didn't account for high wind speeds at all, and sent everyone over the edge into the river in the middle of an enormous storm."

"Oh gosh, that's horrible, did anyone survive?"

"No," Sally said, dodging somebody coming sleepily out of a compartment in their pyjamas. She smiled and apologised, and Esther stayed silent and backed away as far as she could while they passed by in the opposite direction. Realising they were in a sleeper car, Sally lowered her voice even more, and resumed, "They never even recovered all the bodies, there are still over a dozen lying at the bottom of the estuary somewhere." Esther thought that was quite ghastly. "The storm was so bad some of the locals called it a hurricane. You should hear some of the eye witness accounts of the crash, from people watching from the piers. They said it got more than halfway across and then all the lights just vanished. And that was it. A lot of the salvage of the bridge they actually used to build the replacement bridge next to it, which is still there and still used. People say they see the train going across the new bridge at night and then vanishing halfway across. And the train itself they repaired, using the same engine, and called it _The Diver_ afterwards. Lots of people refused to drive it, unsurprisingly. But at least that one has a story to back it up – with over seventy ghosts all together _and_ above a huge source of water, plus the same girders which were part of the crash are still there, it makes sense for there to be a ghost train there."

"That's a tragedy."

"Yeah. People wrote ballads about it, actually. Anyway, that's a legitimate one. A _weird_ one is this recent one from London I heard about when I still lived there, where people see this old diesel engine around an old tunnel near Hadley Wood. I think that's weird because it's the ghost of a train that never had any disaster associated with it, this old one from the 1980s called _Nimbus_. People say they see it all the time, but _I_ never saw it and logically I can't think why it would exist."

"'Logically'? You're the least logical person I've ever met."

"Excuse me!?" Sally exclaimed. That was when someone poked their head out of the very last cabin in the carriage and very aggressively shushed them both, after nearly butting heads with Sally because she was hardly paying attention to where she was going. She smiled and apologised, again, and that was the end of their conversation. Sally didn't appear to have very many good stories about ghost trains, though, and admittedly when Esther thought of the phrase she thought of the dark rides in funfairs. Or the 1997 _Casper_ movie. That was really the top of the list.

But Esther couldn't deny that Sally was making some good points about the plausibility of these different ghost train stories. Though she hated to admit that Sally Sparrow might be right about something – _especially_ something 'spooky' – she now knew herself that ghosts did exist, and that considering they did exist, she was much more likely to believe the stories of a phantom train at Tay Bridge than at an anonymous concrete tunnel in London. Especially when nobody had ever died on this _Nimbus_.

"I'm very logical," Sally muttered when they were out of the sleeper car finally.

"You're not, you think the moon landing was a hoax."

"If you look at the evidence-"

"It was not a hoax. The Doctor has literally seen it from the moon, like, a bunch of times."

"That's what they want you to think."

"Who?"

"NASA. They're covering up the moon landing just like they're covering up Nibiru."

"Not _this_ again…"

"Nibiru is real, Esther. You can't disprove it."

"It's very easily disproven, actually."

"Shh." Sally often shushed Esther when she was right about something, and it just proved that Sally didn't have any legitimate arguments. Especially not for believing in something as ridiculous as Nibiru. It didn't matter though, because they finally arrived at the dining car. She could smell the food coming from within, and it made her stomach rumble. On the balcony, outside in the freezing air they briefly had to pass through, were two waiters smoking long cigarettes. Despite the phenomenal wind, Sally decided she was going to stop and chat, and the waiters were more than happy to oblige the both of them. Esther suspected this was something to do with the fact Sally smiled at them, and people often did what Sally Sparrow wanted when she smiled at them. Whether she knew she had this power, Esther was unsure.

"Hello," she said. Esther couldn't help but draw comparisons to Captain Jack's manner when _he_ said hello to people. "I was wondering if anyone on this train could help me with something."

"What do you need, miss?" one of them asked, tossing his cigarette away immediately upon being questioned and trying to flash her a grin. "Did you only get on at the last stop? I don't suppose I've seen you before. I'd remember." Sally laughed, and that settled it for Esther. She knew _exactly_ what she was doing to these men.

"Yes, the last stop, we were supposed to be on a different train but it got cancelled," she lied easily, "We were just wondering if there's anything… weird on this train. Unusual."

"Not normally," the waiter still smoking said. He wasn't as keen to throw his cigarette away. Esther wanted to go back inside.

"'Normally'?" Sally inquired.

"We weren't supposed to tell anybody about the changes," the one who had been talking to Sally initially asked. Esther looked to her right to see the village in the distance, still just shadows in the moonlight. Strangely, there was nothing which struck her as particularly 'unreal' about their surroundings. But Hollowmire always had a very unreal feel to it, so it would be tricky to delineate any major differences in the atmosphere. Apart from it was a bit colder, she thought. There was something about the Nineteenth Century that always made her think it would be colder.

"Only because they're all rich snobs who hate delays," said the second waiter. Then he glanced at Sally and Esther and hastily added, "No offence."

"Oh, we're not rich or snobs," said Sally, "I'll tell you a secret if you tell me about these changes." It took a lot of effort for Esther to suppress rolling her eyes at that moment.

"They added a carriage," said the second one straight away. The first one seemed annoyed about that, and Esther realised they were vying for Sally's affections, both trying to win her over with the information she desired.

"Where?"

"At the back of the train," said the first.

"What's _your_ secret?" asked the second.

"We haven't got tickets, we just snuck on board. Don't tell the conductor." The second one smiled wryly, clearly thinking he was a lot more attractive than he was. He was playing right into Sally's hands, because she was often quite shameless about using people. Like making Esther pity her enough that she gave her money. "Tell me about this carriage, then."

"We don't know anything about it. It was a last-minute addition. It's slowed the train down a lot though, so it must be heavier than normal."

"Uh-huh. So, the back of the train, you said?"

"Yes, miss. And what's your name, perchance?" the first one jumped in again. Maybe getting a woman's name was the Victorian equivalent of winning her phone number.

"It's, erm… Clara. Clara Oswald. I'll be going now," Sally said, dragging Esther by her elbow back into the car they had initially come from, to the objection of the wait-staff. When the door was closed again and they were back in relative warmth Esther began launching questions at Sally.

"What's the deal? I thought we were going to score some food?"

"I thought you didn't want to because you were worried about, like, hygiene and stuff."

"Everyone should worry about 'hygiene and stuff.' It's only you who's gross."

"Yes, yes. But who can think about food when we've got a _lead_ in our _case_?"

"Apart from me? And also, we're not detectives."

"Anyone can be a detective, Esther. Come along now, we're going back the other way."

"Don't boss me around…" she grumbled.

"Act with a bit more initiative and I wouldn't have to."

"Why were you flirting with those guys?"

Sally laughed once, then said, "I'm surprised you noticed," while wending back through the narrow passages. She was trying to keep her voice as quiet as possible, both of them were, to avoid getting told off again. Esther couldn't wait to leave the stupid train and get back to level ground. She didn't trust this place – whatever it actually was – one bit. "Sometimes you just have to flirt with people you don't like to get what you want. I don't expect you to understand."

"Hey! I can flirt."

Sally couldn't restrain herself, she laughed out loud. _Very_ out loud. So out loud that yet another disgruntled train-goer couldn't stop themselves from poking their head out of their cramped little luxury-bedroom to tell Sally to shut up.

"Sorry, sorry," she waved a hand dismissively, not able to keep the smile from her face, "Inside joke, never mind." They glared at her and slid back into the carriage they had come from. "Seriously, you couldn't flirt if your life depended on it."

"I've literally flirted with people before."

"Which people?"

"Like, this security guard at the CIA, so that he'd let me out without checking my ID when I became a fugitive. And it worked. It was a stolen ID."

" _You_ stole something? Broke a rule?" Sally mocked her as she opened the door into the next carriage and held it open behind her. They were quickly approaching the carriage they had first materialised on, but were most likely than not going to walk straight past it in pursuit of this mysterious addition. Esther hated having to keep walking through the cold night though, and thought there might be snow on the horizon if they stuck around for much longer.

"I think the people in the CIA were breaking plenty of rules trying to orchestrate the Miracle…" she muttered, "But I flirted."

" _Did_ you flirt though, or were you just nice to him?"

"…What do you mean? It's the same thing."

"But you're nice to everyone. So you flirt with everyone? Is that what you're saying?"

"Of course not."

"You don't even _have_ to be nice to someone to flirt with them. Haven't you seen Clara and Jenny flirt? They make fun of each other."

"That's _flirting_!?"

"Oh my god. You really have no idea. You're like a child."

"I'm older than you."

"And are you not often making fun of me for being juvenile?"

"Oh, so _now_ you admit to it?"

"If it means I win an argument with you." Esther grimaced and didn't say anything, trying to put an end to this line of conversation. But Sally wasn't having it, and she also didn't appear to care much about causing disturbances to the people on that train who had actually paid for the privilege of being there. "Go on, then."

"What?"

"This flirting of yours."

"Shut up."

"No, I want to see your technique."

"Who am I supposed to flirt with?"

"I don't know – me?"

" _You_!? No way!"

"What? Why not? What's wrong with me?"

"Do you want me to make a list? Laminate it for you?"

Sally was legitimately aghast. "Are you being, like, homophobic?"

"Yes, obviously, it's totally not because I live with you and I know how gross you are. I'm the one who ends up picking matted, hairy residue of how gross you are out of the shower drain every week. I'm not sure I could think of something nice to say to you even if you actually paid me back all the money you owe me, Sal." Sally gawked at her.

"You little-"

"Please, ma'am," they were interrupted by some other member of staff who was prowling the corridors of the train. He was carrying a tray of dirty crockery and silverware, and Esther and Sally moved to let him through the narrow passageway, "Some of the other passengers have been complaining of noise, would you mind keeping it down or I'm afraid I will have to ask the conductor to eject you both at the next stop."

"Both of us? Why both of us?" Esther argued, "I haven't done anything."

"I'm sorry, miss, but some of the first-class passengers have related to me that they find your accent quite intolerable."

"They what!?"

"Ha!" Sally exclaimed rudely, "Intolerable! That's great!"

"I'll have you know that there's a wealth of historical evidence supporting the claim that most east coast American accents are closer to the accent of the original British colonists than your modern 'received pronunciation' is."

"Evidence like what? The fact we're on a train in 1854 and everyone sounds more like me than like you? Well, actually we're in the north so they sound more like Clara, but still. Your country isn't even eighty years old yet." The man carrying the crockery shook his head at them and left, grumbling something. No doubt they now had another thing to worry about – getting kicked off the train at the next opportunity. Esther didn't care what these uptight aristocrats thought about her accent – she blamed Sally entirely for their current situation.

"…There's a ghost train story in one of my games, you know."

"Oh yeah?" Sally's mood changed immediately. That was always the way with her; when it came to the paranormal, she was very superficial. Like a magpie, her attention would wane and be capture by something else shiny and spectral in a matter of moments. The issues around Esther's accent lay forgotten.

"Yeah. They're on a train going to Salem-"

"Salem? What a cliché."

"The whole game is set in Salem, so. It's to do with the witch trials."

"Urgh, the Salem Witch Trails are _bo-ring_."

"Dozens of people died."

"Yeah, and none of them were even witches. Now, the _Pendle_ Witch Trials, that's way more interesting. And local. But carry on with your story, this train going to Salem."

"So, they're going to Salem to start a new life, and the woman on the train falls asleep and gets woken up a few hours later by the train braking super-hard. Understandably this woman is freaked out – but I guess everyone except you would be freaked out. The train stops in the middle of nowhere and there's a gigantic rainstorm going on, louder than anything else on the train, and in the night she takes a look out of the window. There's a huge bolt of lightning, she says it's the brightest flash of lightning she's ever seen. Personally, I'm not sure it could be _that_ bright, but I guess I've seen more lightning than most… anyway. The woman's husband leaves to go be all alpha-male and see what's going on, when a woman at the back of the train screams. When they go and ask her what she's screaming about, she says that she can see the spirits of the dead walking alongside the train. The woman decides she's gonna go find her husband, so she wanders on back. She ends up passing through the entire train and getting all the way to the front cab where she sees out of the windows that there's just a tree on the line. Pretty typical, right? Then she sees her husband going to help the conductor who's trying to move it. But her husband instead picks up a rock from the ground and crushes the conductor's skull, killing him right there and then. The woman rushes out and he's about to kill _her_ the rock too, his own wife, when he sees something that scares even him. Whatever it was spooks him so much that he runs away into the woods, and she says it looks like a 'ghostly spectre' all dressed in black. He goes off into the woods and she never sees him again, and for the rest of her life afterwards she's tormented by thoughts of what might have happened if they never got on the train.

"I guess, retrospectively, it's kind of not about a ghost train, just some ghosts around a train, sort of, and it's never really explained what's going on. I think it's just _too_ ambiguous to be completely scary. There's a ghost train while you're running around the Museum of Witchcraft collecting the artefacts to unlock the story in the first place, though. It kills you if it hits you – which is ironic considering you're already dead. Also I think this is the longest you've ever gone without saying anything."

"I think we're here," Sally announced. Esther had gotten lost in her retelling of a somewhat poorly-paced ghost story and had been focusing on just following Sally, paying little attention of where they were actually going. They were outdoors again and it felt like it was getting colder and colder the longer they spent in this un-place. Esther shivered in the night chill. "This carriage looks different to the others."

"You're right, it's super gnarly. Like a hobo train."

"Literally the most American thing you've ever said." Esther rolled her eyes. "No, wait, the most American thing you ever said was when we went to McDonald's and you were like 'I asked for a _large_ Big Mac' and they told you it _was_ a large Big Mac and then you complained for half an hour about how you wanted a 'slushie.' Or when you got upset because you couldn't find any Gatorade in the supermarket. What even _is_ Gatorade? Is it made of alligators?"

"Why would they make a soda out of alligators?"

"Well, I don't know. Like gelatine. Lots of fizzy drinks have traces of fish in them, too. Like Lilt, that's full of fish, it's practically a seafood platter."

"Eurgh. And no, they don't make Gatorade out of alligators. That's stupid. Look, maybe we should talk about things before we go in there."

"Things? What things? Are you going to tell me you're in love with me?"

"Gross! No! I mean what's on the other side of that door."

"Like, metaphorically? Our future together?"

"Why do you have to be like this… fine. Go into the creepy carriage."

"I'm surprised you haven't offered to carry me over the threshold."

"I'm going to kill you."

"Lovers' tiff?"

"Everybody already makes fun of us for being married, I don't know why you have to join in as well."

"It's called _flirting_." Esther felt like she was going to be sick. When Esther stopped responding, Sally finally got bored, and went to open the door. The electrification of the train persisted out here though, and in a much more intense way. While before it had been harmless, a tingle on your skin, now Sally got a shock and jumped. "I'm so tired of this! I spend half my life getting electric shocks!" Esther shook her head and didn't even bother telling Sally to stop whining. She wouldn't get nearly as many shocks if she behaved herself.

It was Esther who opened the door of the carriage so that they could finally discover what had happened to the _Night Flyer_ on that cold night in 1854, and what she saw was about as extraordinary as when the ghost train had first materialised in front of her to begin with. The carriage was stripped of seats and was empty of anything you would generally expect to find on board a train; in place of the predicted amenities was a machine, and she could tell after only a second that this machine was the reason for the train's mysterious disappearance. It filled the entire room and was much more advanced than she would expect from the period, more akin to the twisted creations of Thomas Edison in the earlier Twentieth Century she had seen the last time she had travelled in time. She could not for the life of her begin to describe it, but it was electrified so much she worried for Sally's safety being near it. Especially when they saw two dead bodies on the ground, with distinct burn marks on their clothes making it obvious they had been killed by the riotous machine.

"We're totally out of our depth," said Esther.

"What? No we're not! I thought you're really good at Physics?"

" _High school_ Physics! Not whatever _this_ is," Esther said.

"Well… look, there's bits of paper all over the floor, let's go look at them."

"You're staying right there," Esther said, "Away from that thing. It's like a Tesla coil, it'll latch onto you and kill you just like it did them." Amazingly, Sally actually listened to her, for once, and let Esther go into the carriage alone while holding the door open. The noise from the thing combined with the train barrelling down the tracks and the wind picking up served to render her practically deaf, and it was going to be quite tricky communicating to Sally whatever she might find.

The room illuminated only by bright flashes of electricity zipping about the room, Esther stepped over the fresh corpses to pick up the papers strewn about the floor. She could make sense of very little of it, seeing nothing but equations written in complicated handwriting, and she thought they were using symbols of their own creation which she didn't recognise from any mathematics textbooks. She was good at maths, but not good enough to decipher these codes while she was under so much pressure. They'd need a genius to do that, and with two broken phones a genius was not something at their disposal.

She continued to pilfer the room, but it looked like it had been turned over earlier on, perhaps by the two dead scientists she assumed were responsible. Maybe they had been trying to find a way to turn off their creation if it didn't act in the way it was supposed to, because Esther was sure it wasn't supposed to be killing people willy-nilly. Finally she found something that might prove useful, digging a bulky, leather-bound journal stuffed with more papers out from under one of the control consoles for the machine, and like a loyal dog it was this she brought back to Sally to see if she might prove adept at decoding it.

"Here, I found a journal," she said, opening it and holding it for them both to read. Sally had gotten cold out on the ledge of the carriage and had her hands stuffed deep in her coat pockets to keep them warm. Esther's hands were quite alright being as she was still wearing her gloves. She was right about what the journal might contain, too. It was all kinds of things - blueprints and scrawled notes and theories and even more overcomplicated equations, but one thing stuck out as being telling, and that was when Esther, skim-reading, came across a very basic example of the multiverse theory. That was when it clicked, and it was _her_ who had worked it out, _not_ Sally Sparrow. "It's some kind of dimensional transit device."

"A what?"

"You know, like… this, here, he's hypothesising about déjà vu and the multiple universe theory – it's like, Donna has the power to open portals into different universes, she counts as an extradimensional being, that's what Oc'thubha said. And, and – Clara told us that story before! When we told her about Sofia, and she was talking about ghosts as well, do you remember? It was an experimental time machine and the girl got lost in space-time and trapped in some collapsing universe that ran alongside ours! That's where we are, Sally, do you get it? It's totally like in one of my games."

"The one with the ghost train?"

"No, a different one. That machine is using theoretical quantum physics for the first time in history to rip holes in different universes. It brought the whole train through – we've probably only got a tiny amount of time before this entire otherworld collapses in on itself."

"Right. Okay. They built a big machine way ahead of its time which has ripped a hole in the fabric of reality and has kept the passengers unknowingly trapped here for nearly two-hundred years?"

"Yeah!"

"But now they're dead."

"…Yeah…."

"So how do _we_ know how to turn off the damn thing and take the train back to where it's supposed to be!?"

"Uh… there must be something in here, some kind of failsafe. They were obviously looking for something when they died… look, they say, ' _The Faraday generators, while being the forefront of modern technology and innovation, are proving impossible to coax into creating the correct wattage for a long enough amount of time… persistently fluctuates… run more tests_ …' yadda, yadda, yadda…"

"' _Utilisation of a lightning storm and the correct conductive equipment may prove the solution_ ,'" Sally pointed out over Esther's shoulder, "But there is no lightning storm tonight."

"Maybe that's why it didn't work, because we haven't reached another universe, it's just created a new and completely unsustainable one. It was a clear night in 1854, I could see the whole full moon, there can't have been a lightning storm."

"But the Lightning Girl was what brought the train out of hiding to begin with. Or the echo of the train, at least. And the Lightning Girl managed to take _us_ into this universe, so it stands to reason that the Lightning Girl should be able to get us out of here in the end." Esther stared at her, then indignantly shoved the journal into Sally's hands – Sally having to quickly take her hands out of her pockets to take it – and looked at her indignantly.

"I'm not a superhero!"

"You're the Lightning Girl! _You_ got us here and _you_ worked this out and _you_ summoned its ghost to begin with! You're the best chance there is to reverse whatever that machine has done before, you know, the universe collapses."

"I – but – how am I supposed to know if it takes us back to the right universe or not? It could take us to the wrong one."

"Do you think the technology is sophisticated enough to actually cross dimensions?" Sally asked, "Or might the thing just return us to where we started? It's completely broken, it must sort of _know_ it's in the wrong place. If it's, I don't know, in tune with the universe at all?"

"It's a huge risk."

"Think about it this way, if we end up in another universe we might survive, but if we stay here we'll definitely die. And we might work out a way to contact _our_ TARDIS, or Donna, like you said, she could bring us back. Especially when, like you also said, they'll notice we're missing. You've got to _try_ , at least," Sally pleaded with her, knowing that she herself was completely powerless in this situation. All along, this had been more Esther's crusade than Sally's, and she really _was_ the only person who might be able to do anything about it…

* * *

"Clara, look. Maybe they just… went somewhere."

"Well obviously they went somewhere. They're not here."

"It's not completely incomprehensible that we might not have heard about it if they decided to go on a trip."

"People don't just _vanish_ , Jen. When people vanish it's because there's something dodgy going on. I can't get in touch with either of them, their phones are completely disconnected. Which doesn't even make sense – Esther would have given me her number if she got a new phone, and her phone battery never dies because she can charge it herself."

"I just don't think it's too good for you to be worrying so much," Jenny trailed after Clara, who had spent her whole weekend scouring Hollowmire for any sign of the Spooks after they appeared to have completely and utterly vanished into thin air. Disappearances were not something to be taken lightly, and especially not in a place like Hollowmire.

"Are you not?"

" _Yes_ , but they can look after themselves."

"And what if they can't?" This conversation was unfolding on a dark street corner, with Jenny standing underneath a lamppost and Clara off in the shadows.

"It's only been a few days-"

"So what? At one point Amelia Earhart had only been missing for a few days."

"Just come here and listen to me," Jenny said softly, and though she said, 'come here' to Clara, it was she who stepped closer to the shadows, taking both of Clara's hands though Clara was trying to avert her gaze. Jenny looked at her imploringly. "If there's nothing by the time you get up tomorrow, then I promise I'll look into it. Go onto the TARDIS, ask around, maybe even travel back in time and track them directly. Rory could help with that, he can turn invisible, after all. There are a million explanations for where they could be that don't involve them being in grave danger."

"But what if they _are_?" Clara persisted. Jenny was patient, though, infinitely patient, and she sighed and let go of Clara's hands, touching her waist instead.

"Worrying about it won't help anybody." Clara looked at the floor. "Can we please go back to yours and have some hot chocolate now? We're been out here for ages and it's freezing."

"Well… alright. Okay. I'll listen to you." Jenny smiled.

"Good. Because I'll be right. Absolutely nothing will have happened and Sally and Esther will be completely-"

Whether Jenny ever managed to finish her sentence remained a complete mystery, because even if she did it was drowned out by an enormous noise which erupted out of nowhere. A glistening monster exploded into existence, tearing through the street behind them at such speed Clara grabbed Jenny and pulled her away from it. A plume of black smoke filled the air above the dark beast, flickering lights rushing alongside as it screeched against the cobblestones of Hollowmire's deserted, late-night high street. It was a horrible, cringe-inducing sound of iron dragging through stone and creating a hotbed of sparks beneath, and it punctured the quiet mood like a bomb had gone off. It took both of them longer than it should have to realise that what they were looking at was a train, and old-fashioned steam train, running along invisible tracks.

At that point Jenny, her hero complex playing up again, detached herself from Clara and went towards it so she could look around the corner and see that the train had crashed through the old stone fountain. From within the train, Clara could hear screaming.

"What the-!?"

"It looks like it's slowing down," was all Jenny could think of to say. After all, she had no idea what was going on. It was probably one of the weirdest things she had ever seen in her life.

"It better be slowing down, it's not on any rails. It's destroying everything in its way."

"If only you were the telekinetic one," Jenny said, "Or Rose, Rose stopped a train before by getting in front of it."

"I don't think either of us should get in front of that train." It really _was_ slowing down, but Clara took Jenny's hand rather tightly to make sure she definitely _didn't_ try to stop it herself. They were just stuck watching it leave its path of destruction.

It wasn't the longest train in the world, though. Which was probably very lucky. Being on cobblestones and crashing into the fountain proved to almost stop the train in its tracks, and it finally chugged to a halt in front of them at the very last carriage, which looked very different to the others. And there, standing at the edge of the carriage and clinging on for dear life, was none other than Sally Sparrow. Clara and Jenny, agog, stood in the lamplight and stared. Sally met their gaze and for a while nobody said anything.

"…Fancy seeing you here," Sally finally spoke. Clara let go of Jenny's hand, but could do nothing other than stare.

"What's going on?" Jenny asked. Sally didn't seem to have an answer, but it was at that moment that a second person stepped out of the interior of the last carriage of the train. It was Esther, looking notably dishevelled, and she spotted Clara and Jenny as well. Esther pointed at the train like they hadn't seen it before she next spoke.

"I just brought this train out of an alternate universe it was trapped in," she declared proudly, and then her pride vanished immediately, "I think I'm gonna pass out." Esther went to steady herself on the railings, Sally watching her carefully.

"…What's new with you two, then?" Sally asked Clara and Jenny.

"Nothing, we've just been worried about _you_ ," said Clara, "Well, _I've_ been worried."

"Hey, I was also worried," Jenny said.

"But you were telling me off for being worried!"

"I wasn't telling you off, I was trying to calm you down. I couldn't let on that I was worried to, I had to be the rock in this case. Sometimes it's you, sometimes it's me. Whatever our relationship needs at the time. But I was definitely worried; Esther wasn't answering her phone, and she _always_ answers her phone."

"Phone's broken," said Esther, "Travelling onto the train… cable-jumping… complicated…"

"Yeah, that's a long story," Sally dismissed her, "We can save that for later. All you need to know is that this train went missing in another universe in 1854, and we just brought it back complete with all its lost passengers. From 1854."

"Right…" Jenny thought about this.

"And it's 2016. And they're here. An entire train of Victorians."

"Oh… Well... Okay…" Jenny crossed her arms for a moment and thought. "Right... So, Clara – you take Esther home before she faints; Sally – try and round everybody up and keep them in the same place. I'm going to call Jack."

"Jack? Why?" Clara asked.

"Because he's the one with all the retcon. And this seems like a job for retcon. Wipe all their memories and dump them in… where was the train supposed to be going?" Jenny inquired.

"Carlisle," Sally answered.

"Wipe all their memories and dump them in Carlisle where they were meant to be."

"What about the dead bodies?" Sally asked.

"What dead bodies?"

"The scientists who built the weird steampunk machine that made the train cease to exist are dead on here."

"Is their blood still warm?" Clara asked. It was impossible to tell how serious she as being.

"You're not having their blood," said Jenny, "We'll find out who they are and return them to their families while covering up the cause of death."

"Not just a _tiny_ bit of blood?"

"Clara. Esther should go home to where the Syphon is. She just made a train jump universes. You should be the angel I know you are and make sure she gets home safely."

"Fine. But only because you called me an angel." Jenny smiled. "Don't cheat on me with Jack."

"I'd never do that, promise," said Jenny, and Clara leant in and kissed her.

"PDA!" Sally shouted, " _Gross_."

"Shut up," Clara shouted at her, "I'm _busy_." Sally was always complaining about their 'PDA' being overboard (which it really wasn't, they were generally very good about it), but this time they were not destined to get into yet another cyclical argument about it, because all three of them ended up frightened out of their wits by Esther Drummond seemingly teleporting, moving in a flash which couldn't even have lasted half a second and left her materialised and woozy in front of Clara. "What the hell was _that_!?"

"She calls it 'cable-jumping'," Esther indicated Sally, "It's new."

"Well, it's freaky. Give us some warning if you do it again. Now just… come with me," Clara began to lead Esther away, "I'll make you a hot chocolate, one of my famous hot chocolates. The pair of you have had us worried sick…" Sally and Jenny had been listening to Clara addressing Esther, but as they grew distant the voices of some very perplexed Victorian train-goers became apparent, and Jenny remembered that she was actually supposed to be doing something about all that. She sighed and spoke to Sally.

"Right then. Time to call my ex-husband and ask him for help…"

"Have fun."

* * *

"And _then_ it was like she was an actual superhero! Saving the train like that!"

Sally Sparrow concluded her detailed and animated retelling of their adventure aboard the _Night Flyer_ , talking up Esther much more than Esther could be bothered talking up herself. Esther couldn't rightly be bothered to do anything, she was very drowsy, and it was only Clara's constant supply of coffee that was keeping her remotely conscious. And the food.

They were in the kitchen of Number Sixteen, Lunar Terrace, and the only reason she was still in the kitchen was because Clara and Jenny were both so phenomenally worried about the pair of them. She was actually quite flattered, and surprised that she had been right about them noticing she and Sally were gone and coming to look for them. It was nice to have friends like that, she hadn't had many close friends in school because she had been a bit of a nerd (believe it or not) and a loner, then in college she'd focused more on her studies, and at the CIA her only _really_ good friend had been Rex. After that came Torchwood, and while she would consider Jack and Gwen some of her closest friends too, it had been quite brief, fraught with danger, and she had died at the end. Then there had been Sarah, the constant thread throughout her life until her suicide in 2011. But she didn't like to think about Sarah.

"I can't believe you found a real ghost train," said Clara, "That's totally cool. You two really do end up in some weird situations."

"Coming from you I'll take that as a compliment," said Sally, "But wait, I didn't tell you the _best_ bit."

"What's the _best_ bit?" Clara was intrigued. The conversation of the evening had mainly been between Sally and Clara. Jenny was often quiet.

"Esther trying to convince me she knows how to flirt."

"Oh, come on. I'm tired," Esther complained. Clara raised her eyebrows at Esther.

"And _do_ you know how to flirt?"

"Of course not," said Sally. Esther glared at her.

"I don't see how it matters," Jenny came to her aid, "When will she need to flirt with somebody? She doesn't want to date or sleep with anyone."

"And why would I pick to flirt with _you_ , anyway?" Esther said very pointedly at Sally.

"Well, who would you flirt with?" Clara interrupted, "Out of the three of us in this room, if you had to pick one."

"Obviously Jenny," Esther answered easily. She didn't even have to think about it. "She went all the way to Maine and picked up lobster rolls an hour ago because I said I could really go for a real New England lobster roll." Jenny beamed.

"Aw, thanks! That's sweet. For the record, I'm not very good at flirting either."

"That's true," said Clara, "You're completely oblivious to people making advances towards you."

"I can work out when it's men. It's women who are the complicated ones. I can never tell if they're not just being nice…" she mumbled. Clara laughed a little.

"It's a really good lobster roll, though," Esther tried to change the subject. Sally fake-gasped.

"Are you flirting with her!?"

"Leave Esther alone," Clara told Sally, "If you want somebody to flirt with you that badly I'm _sure_ I can spare a few brain cells. You're clearly _gagging for it_." Very overtly she proceeded to wink at Sally, which made her uncomfortable enough that she finally stopped making fun of Esther for next to nothing. Clara grew smug about one-upping Sally, but then her attention returned to Jenny again, who had been looking at the table. "I'm confused – if the train went down in history as being missing along with all its passengers, then what does it mean that you took all the passengers to Carlisle?"

"It's in flux," Jenny said, "Dad's been teaching me how to tell when things are in flux or fixed. The _Night Flyer_ was in flux. If you checked the big book of ghost stories now, it would have vanished. Or changed, to a case of mass-amnesia and a missing train nobody ever saw arrive."

"It's totally hot when you talk about weird time-stuff."

" _Weird time-stuff_?" Jenny asked incredulously.

"Okay, I think I'm going to go to bed, on that note," Esther stood up. She had finished eating a while ago, and the coffee had stopped keeping her awake. She didn't want to listen to people talk in sensual circles around each other. It was a nightmare.

"Yeah, I think we'll go too," Clara said.

"Will we?" Jenny frowned. Clara gave her a look, a look which clearly meant something very private between the pair of them, but not something which Esther was remotely interested in deducing. Jenny changed tact immediately and nodded. "Yes. We will. Go. Now." Esther waited in the corner of the kitchen near the door into the cellar while Clara and Jenny picked up their coats from the back of their chairs (Jenny complaining about getting some food on the arm of her tailor-made one as she put it on), with Sally very surprised by this hasty exit on their part. "I'll be sure to find a recipe for lobster rolls – I've never made one before."

"Just for me?" Esther was perplexed.

"Sure, anytime. And I'm glad you two are okay – you should let us know the next time you're on one of these escapades."

"It all turned out okay in the end," Sally pointed out.

"Barely," said Clara, "Anyway. What she said. Nice lobster rolls, nice night. Come on, Jen."

"Bye!" Jenny waved over her shoulder as Clara practically pulled her out of the house. Jenny barely managed to close the door behind her, and a chilling breeze swept through the house.

"That was weird, they left super quickly."

"They're going to shag. This is why I hate hanging around with couples."

" _What_? No."

"Yes."

"No!"

"Yes, obviously. Look, don't worry about it. Just go to bed, you need to sleep. You're going to faint." Esther didn't say anything. She couldn't think of anything _to_ say. Sally was probably right about the whole fainting-thing. As if to further illustrate Sally's point, she yawned very widely and found herself struggling to keep her eyes open.

"You should go to bed too," she told Sally groggily.

"Sounds like flirting to me." And with that Esther had really had enough, and it was with great relief that she abandoned Sally Sparrow in their kitchen and trudged upstairs to bed, and her biggest challenge of the day was mustering up the motivation to actually get changed into her pyjamas before she collapsed and fell fast asleep.


	7. A Very Spooky Christmas

**AN: Merry Christmas 2017! Please appreciate this and be forgiving that some of the lines don't quite flow and some of the rhymes are a bit off, it has 500 lines and I don't claim to be a master poet but I tried my hardest!**

 _A Very Spooky Christmas_

'Twas the morn before Christmas, and all through the house  
Not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse;  
On the sofa downstairs one girl was asleep,  
Under piles of old blankets she was buried quite deep;  
The TV was still on and the screen was all static,  
Yet again she had forgotten to return to her attic;  
Alone she was lying, all cold and unkempt,  
If she was seen she would be met with contempt.  
In the bedroom above another now slept,  
Unaware of the woman downstairs as she dreamt;  
In a fit she was woken by the sound of her clock,  
And slammed down her hand to turn the stupid thing off;  
But it was nine in the morning and time to arise,  
Though out through the window still dark were the skies;  
Esther rubbed her eyes and crawled out of bed,  
Her dreams still flickering inside of her head;  
She put on her slippers and pulled her gown from the door,  
And headed below though her eyes were still sore;  
She filled up the kettle and put tea in the mugs,  
Then noticed her ears were still holding their plugs;  
She removed the soft foam and put it away,  
Taking her tea next door to kick-start their day.  
Sally Sparrow had passed out, nothing less she expected,  
All of Esther's good habits her housemate rejected;  
She put the mugs on the floor and picked up the remote  
To turn on the news and clear loudly her throat;  
Startled awake was the girl on the couch,  
Consciousness that day made her into a grouch.

"What are you doing? It's the middle of the night."

"It's nine in the morning – sorry if I gave you a fright;  
The living room is shared, I can come in if I want,  
Are you feeling okay? You look kind of gaunt."

"I'm not surprised I look gaunt, I've not slept a wink."

"If it makes you feel any better, I brought you a drink."  
Sally looked down at the tea by her feet,  
When it came to pure kindness no-one had Esther beat;  
She reached to the floor and brought the drink to her lips,  
And though it was hot, drank a few tasty sips.  
"Do you know what today is?" Esther eagerly asked,  
Like Sally didn't know what sad day approached fast;  
"It's Christmas Eve!" she exclaimed with a tone of pure glee,  
But Sally just groaned and thought she needed a pee.  
"Are you not excited? It's the best time of year!"

"I wish that Christmas would just stop drawing near."

"You don't like Christmas!? That's so typical of you,  
Anything that's fun you always hate through-and-through."

"It's way too commercial – a money-making scam,  
Christmas is the world's most celebrated sham.  
Jesus was born in the summer, you know;  
Christians stole the winter solstice eons ago.  
Santa's plain creepy, he breaks into your house,  
To me he's as welcome as a blood-sucking louse."

"I wouldn't be surprised if you have some of those already-"

"-And don't get me started on what I think about turkey;  
The meat is too dry and the stuffing is bland;  
Crackers obnoxious and might burn your hand.  
The prizes are rubbish because paper crowns suck-  
I spent last Christmas Day on my own and ate duck."

"Did you get any presents? This doesn't sound great."

"I had a Yule log to myself that was almost out of date."

"But Sally, that's awful – you were all on your own?  
Did you not even get a kind call on your phone?"

"I stayed by myself and that's how I like it,  
No-one ever wants to see me, so why should I fight it?"

"I want to see you, I think you're my best friend."

"When Christmas rolls round all of my friendships end.  
You're wasting your breath, I won't change my mind,  
If you carry on with this, no respite you'll find.  
I'm not doing Christmas, I hate all the festivities,  
The tinsel, the trees, the carol-singing activities.  
It's too cold to go for walks to escape all the 'fun',  
So this year when it comes to merry-making I'm done.  
I'll have nothing to do with it, you can go see the vampire,  
Since I'm sure Jenny's feast will be something to admire."

And with that Sally Sparrow took her leave from the room,  
Bringing with her the tea and her mood full of gloom;  
She climbed both flights of stairs to reach her bed high above,  
And collapsed on the sheets still feeling quite rough.  
Her new medication made her tired all day,  
If there was a cure for insomnia this was the way;  
It took very few seconds for her to fall fast asleep,  
And entered a state of dead dreaming so deep.  
Meanwhile Esther Drummond sat alone in a chair,  
Wishing her friend would abandon her lair;  
On that cold Christmas Eve she wished more company,  
Though of close friends to talk to she did not have many;  
So Esther decided she would quit their place,  
She put on her coat and wrapped her scarf round her face;  
Leaving the building she thought little of Sally,  
In wishing she would join her Esther only did dally.  
After that moment the house stood all vacant,  
Only Sally asleep with her bitterness so blatant.

When she later awoke night had fallen outside,  
She'd slept all through the day and had not even tried;  
Her room was pitch black and no sounds could be heard,  
In being a humbug Sally had kept her word.  
She was upstairs alone with no Esther in sight,  
And no Christmas cheer to spoil her darkness with light;  
But a holiday in gloom this was not meant to be,  
As a glow in her bedroom made her want to flee.  
She turned on her heel and saw there in the corner  
An acquaintance to which she had once been a mourner.  
Smiling sweetly the spectre spooked our antihero,  
She ventured to speak and said, "Hello, Sally Sparrow."  
Sally did shriek when addressed by the ghost,  
This image of her friend whom she thought she had lost.  
"But you're dead!" she exclaimed, not believing these fables,  
"You lived your life in the past when attacked by the angels!  
They touched you and sent you back to Nineteen-Twenty,  
How can it be that you're here and my Kathy?"  
For it was Kathy Nightingale standing by Sally's bed,  
And Sally thought her new pills must be breaking her head.

"You don't have to worry, I'm not here to cause harm,  
I understand that me being here might spark some alarm."

"'Some alarm' is a simplification, I think!  
Is this a scheme of Esther's to make me go see a shrink?  
You're dead and buried in a grave down in London;  
You'd better hurry up and solve for me this conundrum."

"Now are you saying that ghosts don't exist?  
It's too hard to believe I've returned from the mist?  
With your electric best mate such visits are easy;  
Should I just say 'boo' or would that be too cheesy?"

"You're really making jokes at a time like this!?  
It's getting pretty obvious someone's taking the piss."

"Calm down, this is more than just a courtesy call,  
I'm here to warn you of your impending fall;  
Good-tidings and joy are not things to escape,  
And you'll be lucky if _you_ manage to escape from your fate;  
Three more visits of this kind you're going to receive,  
And it will be up to you if you listen or leave;  
As your old friend I'll tell you to be patient,  
But when it comes to your tests I'm only an agent."

"Tests? What test? Who's testing stuff on me?  
I won't join in with any experiments; I'm free."

"It's your bitterness and anguish that does let you down,  
Don't you know that a smile is just a turned-around-frown?  
And a face such as yours which is always upset,  
Can easily twist when with compassion it's met;  
I cannot stay long so take heed of my message,  
On this Christmas Eve you must not be aggressive;  
Three ghosts you will meet who will show you harsh truths,  
It would be more helpful if you tried not to be rude."

"But – Kathy, don't go, you can't leave me alone,  
Since those statues stole you I've been all on my own!"

"But you're not on your own, and good friends you've got now,  
If you take them for granted you'll just be a cow;  
Sorry for sounding so harsh, but it's true,  
You're way too sarcastic and it makes people hate you."  
These were the last words that she heard from the ghost,  
Who then up and vanished and abandoned her post;  
Darkness obscured the message she had been shown,  
And again Sally Sparrow was left all alone;  
With tears in her eyes and with her heartbeat racing  
She collapsed on the bed not knowing what she was facing.  
After some moments of dawdling she knew what she must do,  
And walked out of her room in search of someone new.  
Someone who could explain the things she had just seen,  
Who would be able to help Sally awake from her dream;  
She picked up her coat and fled from the spectre,  
Intent that her quest was now to find Esther.  
She tore through the town with a fast, frenzied gait,  
Because getting Esther's help simply could not wait;  
It was raining outside and the streets were all icy,  
With the lamp-posts aglow and the tree lit up nicely;  
It was in the town square this engorged monster loomed,  
And high on its head a bright star was marooned;  
With tinsel and baubles hanging low from its branches,  
The village Christmas tree caused Sally more anguish;  
She did not like the holidays, it was hardly a crime-  
Why could no-one accept she hated this 'merry time'?  
She left the village and went off towards the moors,  
Where Clara the Vampire would be resting indoors;  
Hopefully Esther would be idling there too,  
And Sally could join them and take up a pew.  
She drew up to the cottage and knocked on the door,  
And heard laughter within which made her feel sore;  
After knocking again the door was finally opened,  
Jenny stood there draped all over with garland.

"Sally's here! She's here! To join in the fun!  
Come in, sit down, have eggnog with everyone."

"I really can't stay, do you know if Esther's inside?  
I'm desperate and I insist that I won't be denied."

"You don't want to come in? We've got you a present,  
And crackers and chocolate and everything pleasant."

But Sally didn't care for these silly distractions,  
She wanted Esther's opinion on her ghostly visitations;  
With a sigh, Jenny retreated back into the house,  
And Esther appeared like an unhappy spouse.

"What do you want? To insult Christmas some more?"

"I have something to say, can you please shut the door?"

She stepped into the cold and closed the door behind her,  
"This better be good, I was warm by the fire."  
Sally found that the words got caught in her throat,  
And she stood feeling useless with rain on her coat.  
"What's wrong? Did something happen while I wasn't there?"

"Yes, something which gave me a terrible scare.  
I've told you about Kathy? My friend sent back in time?  
She appeared in my room like she never even died!"

"That doesn't make sense, if there was a ghost I would know."

"How would you? You weren't even there when it showed.  
She told me three more ghosts are going to appear,  
And ordered me to be nice and try to spread festive cheer."

"She _what?_ " and here Esther Drummond did laugh,  
"Three ghosts on Christmas Eve? That's totally whack."

"She was standing right there! Right next to my bed!"

"Do you think these new pills might be messing with your head?"

"So now I'm crazy? Thanks for all of the support,  
I don't know why I came here – I don't know what I thought-"

"We'll just go to the doctor after Christmas is done,  
In the meantime you can join in with all the festive fun.  
The ghost did tell you to spread Christmas cheer-"

"You reacting like this is exactly what I feared!"  
She turned on her heels and stormed off down the path,  
Feeling inside herself a great sense of wrath.

"Sally? Come back! You don't have to be alone."

"You obviously don't care so I'll just go sit at home.  
Maybe I'll make friends with these so-called ghosts,  
I could even whip up a quick turkey roast."  
She outright ignored everything else Esther said,  
And decided once more to return to her bed.  
But Sally's evening was not destined to end in this way,  
For her sour attitude she was going to pay.

In front of a house in the pale light of the moon,  
A young child did stand who was humming a tune;  
She looked into the window with warm light within,  
Sally found herself captured by the song she did sing;  
For the words were familiar and so was the girl,  
Yet it was something unknown to all others in the world;  
A song her parents had written when she had been a child,  
And now the little girl met Sally's eyes and smiled.  
Sally was petrified for she recognised this face  
From childhood photos now buried in disgrace;  
This girl was herself, there was no doubt about it,  
She had the same dimpled smile and old Christmas outfit;  
A jumper knitted for her by her deceased mother,  
Which she had worn every year without any falter;  
It had been future-proofed and hung huge on the kid,  
But since Sally's parents deaths it had been buried and hid.

"How are you here? You're not real, you're impossible,  
Ghosts I can believe – but this is implausible."

"I am the Ghost of your Christmas Past,  
To show you how you made yourself so outcast."

The little girl giggled and beckoned Sally over,  
And Sally gave in to the child and inched that bit closer;  
When she stood in the light coming out of the house  
She felt an odd warmth and felt small as a mouse;  
Through the window she saw a reflection now lost,  
Of her mother and father, a dead image in the frost;  
They were smiling and laughing and now the girl was within,  
Sat at the top of the table and on her face was a grin;  
She unwrapped her presents and wailed with joy,  
Her collection was growing with toy after toy;  
When presents were done it was onto her breakfast,  
A chocolate feast which would result in the dentist.

In the cold air outside Sally watched this unfold,  
A dozen Christmas stories she had never retold;  
She rubbed her hands together and continued to stare,  
Ignoring the cold and the ice in the air;  
On the opposite pane her childhood continued,  
To play out like a video with an ending so doomed;  
Christmas dinner was served with all of the trimmings,  
Turkey, sprouts, gravy and many other good things;  
She could still taste the homemade stuffing on her tongue,  
A family recipe handed down generations one by one;  
Sally watched her parents kiss the girl on the head,  
But all Sally could think of was how her family was dead.  
Tears brimmed in her eyes and they splashed to the ground,  
She began to cry in the street and was really quite loud;  
By her side the Ghost of Christmas Past reappeared,  
Took hold of her hand and kind words volunteered.

"All these many good things are not gone from you now,  
Happiness is something you yourself disallow."

"How can you say that and then show me these things?  
They died in a car crash – what woe this scene brings!  
You are only reminding me of what I no longer possess,  
A loving home and a life, all I feel is distress!  
Go from my side and show me not one thing more,  
When I see these memories I feel sick to my core."

"These are the shadows of things that have been,  
They are what they are, do not blame me!"

In a flash, the ghost vanished and the scene was extinguished,  
And Sally did hope her ghostly visits were finished;  
Alone in the dark and the rain she did ache,  
When she thought of her parents she felt her heart break.  
But it was not the end and the night was not done,  
Her lessons in the holidays were only just begun;  
She heard a great rumble come up from the ground,  
For the source of this disturbance she looked all around;  
She remembered the ghost train erupting from nothing,  
And got a feeling something much like it was coming;  
From nowhere a vehicle burst into life,  
Red, giant and glowing – it gave Sally a fright;  
Someone slammed on the brakes and it came to a stop,  
Right by her side with bright lights all on top;  
There was no mistaking what she was seeing before her,  
A gigantic lorry bearing the name: Coca-Cola.  
The side door swung open and a man did step down,  
White beard, red coat, a large belly so round;  
There was no doubt about it, here he was, Santa Claus,  
He had traded his reindeer to preach Coca-Cola's cause.

"Sally Sparrow! Come here and know me better, my girl,  
For an orphan like you I have only the world;  
I am the Ghost of Christmas Present come knocking,  
To show you the joys which are missing from your stocking."  
Into a tight hug this next ghost did drag her,  
And she wished this experience would be finished faster.  
He was over eight feet tall, a monster all in red,

"Are you going to show me more people who are dead?"

"Only a few, and they are unusually lively,  
Let us leave this old street, it is awfully grimy."

The Ghost took her hand and the whole world did shift,  
A warm room was conjured as they passed through this rift;  
It was Clara Ravenwood's house which she had abandoned,  
There was Clara herself with her alien companion;  
She was holding some mistletoe aloft with her hand,  
With Jenny in front of her the pair of them did stand;  
They only kissed briefly for Esther was there,  
For displays of affection Esther hardly did care;  
The fire was stoked and heat flooded the room,  
It was miles away from Sally's pervasive sense of gloom;  
The Christmas tree was bent underneath the ceiling,  
There were presents and crackers and that festive feeling.

"I don't understand how you celebrate Christmas,"  
Esther Drummond did ask of the home's undead mistress,  
"Aren't all of you vampires meant to cringe at religion?  
A sad side-effect of your immortal condition?"

"It's practically a secular holiday today,  
And I've always enjoyed making the Yuletide gay."  
They could not see Sally, nor the Ghost she was with,  
This Santa Claus figure she had thought was a myth.

"All I can see is that they're happy without me,  
So I can retreat to my bedroom without feeling guilty.  
They don't need me at all, they're having fun on their own-"

"It really is a shame Sally ran off back home,"  
Esther countered her thoughts with a sad sentiment,  
And sighed, still mourning this turn of events.

"If she wants to come join us then she's more than welcome,  
I think her anti-Christmas stance is just some lonely rebellion,"  
It was Jenny Young who said this as she sat in the armchair,  
And as Clara walked past she messed up Jenny's hair;  
Jenny glared for a minute but when Clara pouted she smiled,  
Clara sat in her lap content to remain sat there a while.

"They're watching _Love, Actually_ , they're glad that I'm gone,  
And I still think that Christmas is just some long con."

"My girl, you're mistaken, look at Esther there,"  
So Sally did turn her gaze on Esther to stare,  
"Does she look happy to you? You see a smile on her face?  
She's sad and she wishes you were here in this place.  
Her sister is dead and her nieces are scattered,  
And here's you acting as though none of it mattered.  
Whom do you think is her best friend on this island?  
You've left her alone, and now she sits there in silence."

"I thought Christmas Present was supposed to be fun?  
Jolly and good-willed? But you've just been glum."

"I was happy to start with but the fun is all finished,  
Another year passes by and my form is diminished."  
Before Sally's very eyes the Ghost began to decay,  
Shrinking and starving to her horrified dismay;  
It became a wizened old man with an expression of sorrow,  
And he turned into nothing in front of Sally Sparrow.

From somewhere behind her a bright light did appear,  
She was blinded and filled with a horrible fear;  
The warm fire was vanished, she was no longer indoors,  
Out in the darkness and the cold of the moors;  
The source of the light she could not quite discover,  
But it bore into her soul and was void of all colour;  
A figure emerged from the mist it produced,  
To a planetary visitor she was now introduced;  
Its skin was all grey and its eyes black and shining,  
A tall, slender frame – this was an alien sighting;  
And the source of the light was a huge UFO,  
But the creature pointed Sally to more pictures of woe;  
The third ghost this was, her ordeal almost done,  
But a powerful spirit was Christmas Yet to Come;  
Her eyes followed the direction of its long, glowing finger,  
While the spaceship above did not stop to linger;  
Daylight replaced the painful floodlights it had,  
Now was illuminated a picture so sad;  
An old woman dressed in rags was asleep in the street,  
With a box for her home and no shoes on her feet;  
Her tin can did not rattle, it was void of all money,  
A decrepit lump by the road, she looked like a junkie.

"Oh my god, is that me? Living out here in the dirt?"  
From the contents of this vision Sally was deeply hurt;  
The alien spoke not, no matter how much she implored,  
She felt much more alone than she had ever felt before.  
Then she heard voices approach down the street,  
And decided that surely she was in for a treat;  
For here was Clara and Jenny, they themselves still unchanged,  
A vampire and her consort, neither of which ever aged;  
The elderly Sally reared her mud-spattered face,  
And entreated the young girls to treat her with grace;  
But these two, hand in hand, passed Sally right by,  
And the Sally who watched only wanted to cry;  
They were laughing and carrying bags full of presents,  
Wearing warm coats and scarves straight past the woman they went;  
She tried to call out but made only a croak,  
Not one sound passed through the boundary of her throat;  
"I'm right there! Can't you see me!? Just turn and look here!"

Clara then turned to Jenny to speak in her ear,  
"Do you ever remember that girl we once knew?"  
Clara asked with old Sally just out of their view;  
"Sally who hated Christmas, do you remember?  
There was nothing she liked about the month of December."

"Vaguely," Jenny said with a smile and a pause,  
"Why did she hate Christmas? Did she have much of a cause?"

"Because my parents died and then left me with nothing,  
Without them it felt pointless, empty, disgusting…"  
She was utterly defeated, and the ghost knew it too,  
Maybe now she had Esther, Christmas could become something new?  
Clara and Jenny laughed and continued their journey,  
Shortly old Sally would be found on a hospital gurney;  
She curled up in the street with nobody at all,  
And died there in her sleep frozen solid against the wall;  
All this Sally did see while the Ghost stood nearby,  
Unspeaking and scary – but it did not once lie;  
If she didn't change her ways she would die with no home,  
With nothing or no one and all on her own;  
It was what she had said that she wanted the morning,  
But it was a fate which nobody but Sally was mourning.

"You've got me! I'm sorry, I'm a bitter old Scrooge,  
But there's nothing but pain inside of this subterfuge!  
I don't want to end up dead like that in the streets,  
Please, tell me what to do to stop this and make peace!"  
With the alien spirit she did plead and beg,  
Though her every demand seemed to fly over its head;  
Like an old photograph the thing started to fade,  
Until nothing remained and she was surrounded by shade.

Again, out on the moors Sally staggered around,  
Sobbing and weeping from the future she'd found;  
Without a ghostly guide she stumbled over the hills,  
In the middle of nowhere surrounded by chills;  
When, in her sadness, her foot did misstep,  
She found herself tumbling through an old mining vent;  
For miles it felt like she fell through the air,  
Tripping and falling into a huge creature's lair;  
When she took in her surroundings to see where she was,  
She recognised the cave and so must not be too lost;  
It was the old coal mine complex below the village,  
Where Oc'thubha did live and shape the people in his image;  
Far under Hollowmire Sally got to her feet,  
With the lights not enough to see the thing underneath.

" _Yo! Sally! Always nice to see you here, bro,  
_ _I'm glad that you totally found your way here to my home.  
_ _I'm so sorry you're sad, but I hella need to confess-  
_ _It was me all along who put you under such duress_."

"You what," Sally questioned with a snarl in her voice,  
"You showed me these horrors without so much of a choice?"

" _I was worried about Esther, she's a cool little dude,  
_ _Doesn't deserve to be on the wrong end of your bitter mood.  
_ _It's the holiday season, good will to all men,  
_ _I wanted to see you happy about Christmas again_."

"You had no right to do that! To go crawl through my brain!  
Find memories I would have been fine if I never saw again!"

" _We can't change our pasts, but the future is different,  
_ _I swear nothing you saw was me being ignorant.  
_ _I totally experience life on a higher level than you,  
_ _I see the past, the present, the future – the cold, hard truths;  
_ _I showed you because you don't deserve that sad end,  
_ _Though I'm sorry about it since I didn't mean to offend.  
_ _It's all still real and my theatrics got you to listen,  
_ _And honestly I've always enjoyed the story by Dickens._ "

"I'm going to die on the streets by myself?  
Losing everything I've got, including my health?"

" _You will if you keep pushing everyone away,  
_ _But there's still time to change – it's totally Christmas Day!  
_ _You've got a full stocking, Esther's not one to scrimp,  
_ _Go look in on their holiday and see what you think.  
_ _Through my tricks I hope the important things are now clear,  
_ _By the way, Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!_ "

Oc'thubha had done it, won with his mind games and tricks,  
Though this was a fact Sally hated to admit;  
She stole out of the caves and to The Mermaid above,  
Where Alec the bartender wished her much Christmas love;  
Over Hollowmire now lay a white sheet of snow,  
Surely a trick of Oc'thubha's – though she did not care to know;  
The morning was crisp with the long night now vanished,  
It wasn't long til she made it to Clara Ravenwood's cottage;  
And though she had not one gift and had been sour all season,  
They dragged her inside with drunk, merry greetings;  
Jenny poured the Buck's Fizz and Esther beamed with delight,  
That Sally had decided to return from her flight;  
It was Clara and Jenny's first Christmas together,  
And Sally stayed by the fire to keep warm from the weather;  
Esther was disconnected from her family too,  
So with Sally combined, orphans they did make two;  
Yet nothing felt sad on that bright winter's day,  
For the whole of the holiday she decided to stay;  
The morning was grand but the evening was better,  
As half a dozen people piled in to share dinner;  
Both Claras were there, and Adam and Oswin,  
And the Doctor himself with his big, trademark chin;  
It was Jenny, alone, who had cooked up this feast,  
With normal portion sizes very much increased;  
Sally had not eaten so much food since she was young,  
All of it was impossibly delicious on her tongue;  
They soon pulled the crackers and all wore paper crowns,  
Her bah-humbug sneer had been turned upside-down;  
There was joy and good cheer of every persuasion,  
But Oswin interrupted this festive occasion:  
"There's something that's bothered me all of this time,  
Does anyone know why we're speaking in rhyme?"

 **AN: There's just one last thing I'd like to point out at the end here, and that is that in Shakespeare when they speak in verse and characters finish off one another's rhyming couplets it often signifies a bond between those characters - it's like finishing each other's sentences but the next level - and that actually the only characters who ever complete rhymes for each other throughout this (and I did this on purpose) are Sally and Esther. Even Clara and Jenny don't finish the other's rhymes.**


	8. The Curious Creature: Part One

**AN: Yes, I have CHANGED THE NAME of this fic from "Spook Watch" to "Spooky Hollow" because I've always really hated the name "Spook Watch" and I FINALLY thought of a better one. Also this storyline will be three chapters I think instead of the usual two.**

 _The Curious Creature_

 _-Part One-_

"The 1st of January, 2000, she was arrested for public indecency and possession of class C narcotics, sentenced to six months in prison, claimed she got 'carried away' with New Years' celebrations, ended up serving seven months because of an incident while inside involving what was alleged to be a sexual assault, though she maintains that the girl was 'into it,'" Esther did air quotations as she spoke. "8th of December the same year, arrested for possession with intent to sell of prescription drugs, sentenced to ninety days because the drugs in question were a type of mild painkiller used only on animals, said she got them from a 'cute boy' because of her 'sick cat.' 19th of April 2001, arrested on suspicion of cat-napping – it turned out the cat in question was not, in fact, her cat but was the cat of somebody who lived a couple blocks away, she got let off when she gave the cat back but they made a note of it because of all her priors. 1st of October 2003-"

"That's my birthday," Sally interrupted while she tied the laces on her boots, "My eighteenth birthday, actually."

"Well, _yeah_ , I know. Anyway, on your eighteenth birthday in 2003, she was questioned in regard to the rape of a girl she knew and managed to positively identify the guy who'd been stalking her for weeks. The guy actually confessed and got sent down. Then on the 30th of March 2004 and again on the 4th of August she was questioned twice about the whereabouts of a known drug dealer. And finally, this is the big one, on the 7th of September 2006 she was arrested and charged with breaking and entering and attempted murder."

"Excuse me? _Attempted murder_?"

"The police report says she stabbed a man in the eye with a fork, a man who was the… boyfriend of a girl she was allegedly sleeping with," Esther talked as she read, " _He_ actually got charged with assault and battery because they got into a fight and he dislocated her wrist. But she took a plea deal and the sentence was reduced to GBH and they dropped the B &E charge; apparently there was some ambiguity at the time about whether she was let in by the girl or not. She was sent to prison for eight years because the guy went blind and needs a glass eye, and again while in prison on 2nd of November 2011 she was given an extended sentence because of being found in possession of 'contraband.'"

"Contraband?"

"Pornography, the footnote says. Gotta be one of the craziest rap sheets I've ever seen. Anyway, my point was she's just been released on parole, last week, and I'm gonna need to keep an extra-special watch on this one. Clarissa Jenkins, goes by 'Ris' according to her files here. Lives in Manchester. I've never been to Manchester – is it nice there?"

"No, not really," said Sally, "Will you get ready? We've got a bunch of errands to do today."

"I've been ready for the last half hour, you're the one who wouldn't put your shoes on because you were watching _Homes Under the Hammer_."

Sally scoffed and shook her head, looking at Esther like she was appalled, "Don't pretend like you weren't watching it too. You've just been sitting there on your computer stalking Clara's duplicates."

"It's what I'm paid for."

"I would've thought you had some moral objections to surveillance. I _have_ noticed that you have your webcam taped on that laptop," Sally pointed out. She _did_ have her webcam taped.

"I don't want anybody hacking into the camera…"

"Uh-huh. So _that's_ a conspiracy you believe in?"

"It's not a conspiracy, there's evidence, and I've seen the software, on errands to different departments in the CIA. I wasn't on surveillance, I was on data collection. It's just reading a lot of blogs and Facebook posts. And criminal records. You're wearing your coat inside out," Esther pointed out as she closed all of her windows and shut her laptop down. She _had_ been ready for the last half hour.

Sally fumbled with her coat to turn it the right way around. Esther wondered if Sally had ever washed that coat, and then she tried to stop wondering about that very quickly because she was sure the answer was 'no.' Esther turned the TV off and then shoved her laptop underneath the blanket on the chair so that it couldn't be seen through the window. Not that the curtains were open, she was just very safety conscious and didn't want her belongings being stolen.

"I'm not happy about this, by the way," Esther reminded Sally for the umpteenth time.

"Yeah, whatever, we've been living together for four months and Dylan still won't shut up about how he hasn't met you," Sally said dismissively, "And I'm sick of him texting me at three in the morning about how great he thinks you sound and how he doesn't seem to accept the facts of what asexuality is. So you're gonna meet him and tell him to piss off yourself so I don't have to do it anymore."

"Isn't he your friend?" Esther frowned, unlocking the front door with Sally's keys, which she had left in the lock typically enough. It was where she always kept her keys, leaving Esther to remember to remove them every time she went out on her own because otherwise she wouldn't be able to lock the door behind her. It was misty again outside, like always. There was something persistent about the mist in Hollowmire, and it smelt unusual, too. She couldn't quite put her finger on the stench, but suspected the weather had something to do with Oc'thubha. "Didn't he sell you your creepy book on Hollowmire to begin with?"

"Yeah, sort of. He bought our shop. You know how I used to run a shop." Sally stood loitering at the bottom of the steps in the overgrown garden, next to the plastic skeleton, while Esther made sure the door was locked.

"…No."

"Didn't you?"

"No, you never mentioned that," Esther handed Sally her set of keys.

"Clearly your powers of surveillance aren't all they're cracked up to be. But-" Sally slipped and nearly fell, and Esther grabbed her arm to stop her from cracking her head open on the concrete path in their garden; good thing she had her special gloves on. "What on…" Sally lifted her boot and found something damp sticking to it – a paper flyer, wet from the rain earlier. She peeled it from her sole carefully and tried to straighten it out. It was muddy and hard to read though, Esther could only decipher the word 'travelling.'

"Flyer distribution is so terrible for the environment," Esther commented. Sally did not disagree, and then scrunched the paper into a ball and dropped it into their green wheelie bin, thinking little else of it. Sally resumed what she had been about to say on the topic of her old life in London.

"But yeah, we had a shop, sold second-hand books and DVDs. And then, you know, there was the whole financial crisis thing the country's still not recovered from, and Dylan bought it from us. But I kept hanging around there, he just let me," she shrugged, "I knew more about running a shop than him. He stopped selling DVDs in the end and turned it into a book shop, and when he came up here he took all the stock with him to the new shop," she explained all this as they walked briskly through the cobbled streets. They were very old-fashioned, Esther sometimes thought, and the lampposts were all Victorian-looking. Like they belonged in Narnia. "Anyway, after that Larry got some office job to support both of us and I focused on my photos. I actually got, uh… two pictures, I think, in National Geographic. No, it was one in National Geographic, and then maybe half a dozen more in various other magazines. Well, those were the ones I got paid for. I'm not a _complete_ unknown in the world of photography."

"Uh-huh…" Esther thought about this story she had never heard before. Dylan bought Sally's old shop? Sally had once owned a shop, run a business? Maybe it had mostly been Larry's thing, Esther couldn't really picture Sally in a shop. "Why don't you work for Dylan, then? He must have been hiring, because he hired Clara when she moved here."

"Oh, he tried to talk me into it, actually, what with me desperately needing money and about to be kicked out. But, uh, I wasn't interested. Being in a shop… this is going to sound totally sad, but it reminded me of Larry. After _just_ getting away from him. When he dumped me."

"Don't take this the wrong way, but I'm genuinely surprised that you've ever had a real job."

"What way am I supposed to take that?" she frowned. Esther tried to think of a good answer to that, but could not. Sally continued to walk with her hands dug into her pockets. "I'm not inept, you know. I'm a human being. Anyway, Dylan's alright, just a bit annoying. Texts too much. However bad you might feel for him, don't let him have your phone number."

"How do I know _you_ won't give him my number? Or Clara?"

"Why would we do that?"

"For a joke."

"Yeah, it _would_ be quite funny now you mention it…" Sally said, though her smile told Esther she was only teasing, for once. She was finally getting good at telling when Sally Sparrow was being serious or not, or at least, she hoped she was. "It's too misty out here. Why do you think that is?"

"I don't know, I'm not into meteorology." Sally seemed preoccupied by the weather as they finally made it onto the high street. It was such a small village, just the town square – still partially destroyed after the _Night Flyer_ had burst chaotically back onto the scene – and another few streets with sparse shopfronts snaking off towards the hills. "Do you ever think about how small it is here?"

"When I was growing up I knew people whose back gardens were bigger than this entire village," said Sally.

"Wait, what? In London?"

"Well, no, their second homes. In the country. Honestly though, this is the kind of place that could drive you crazy. Serial killer crazy," Sally said, "Maybe it _wasn't_ the best place to come to try and get my life back on track…"

"Is _that_ what you're trying to do? You've been here for months, have you actually started?"

"Hey! I'm taking my pills. That's a step." Esther resisted the urge to suggest to Sally that she should get a real job next. "Maybe you should get _your_ life back on track."

Esther scoffed, "I've almost got every golden gun in _Call of Duty_ , how much more 'back on track' can you get?"

"I think a hard drug habit might be more back on track than that."

"Maybe your next step should be trying to be less rude," Esther grumbled, pushing open the door of the bookshop now they had arrived. It took hardly any time at all to get from their house to the shop, and no doubt Clara had heard and smelled them coming. It was impossibly stuffy in that building. Incredibly narrow shelves stacked precariously with yellow paperbacks. They piled up on the floor, too, and were very badly organised by Esther's standards. It was dark as well, which she could only assume was Clara's vampiric influence trying to keep the sunlight out, but the dust combined with the gloom would make even the most experienced spelunker claustrophobic. She had only been in there once before, briefly, to actually buy a book, but she had come in the evening when Dylan had been away.

"To what do I owe the pleasure?" Clara said loudly, scaring them both out of their wits. She was sitting there on the desk, in the middle of moving her legs because she'd had her feet up on the countertop.

"Did you just get there? Can you teleport now?" Sally asked, alarmed.

"No. It's to do with the light. Hard to see, don't cast a shadow," she said, "Dylan keeps telling me off for not being more welcoming to customers." She folded down the corner of whatever book she was reading and set it down, leaning on the table on her elbows. "What was that I overheard about Esther doing hard drugs?"

"She's thinking about doing heroin. You know, for a hobby."

"I'm not," said Esther.

"Well, obviously. I know better than to believe anything Sally says."

"Hey, I'll have you know I'm incredibly trustworthy," said Sally, but she was unconvincing. "You're here early, aren't you? It's only one o'clock."

"Dylan's been upstairs building shelves and painting all morning, needed me to come in early," Clara explained, "I've been in since ten. I stayed with Jenny last night though, so. Time machines are very handy when you want to sleep in. And she made me an omelette, what an angel."

"Got many customers today?"

"Absolutely none. Unless either of you two want to buy something?" she suggested, looking mainly at Esther, who _was_ tempted to peruse the shelves…

"Wouldn't want to give you the pleasure," Sally quipped, "We're just here to see Dylan, actually."

"Good, I'm sick of him asking me questions about Esther," said Clara.

"Why does he ask questions about me…?" Esther asked, disliking this situation more and more.

"I don't know. Because we both talk about you? He asks a lot of questions about Jenny, too," Clara said, "The difference is I like talking about Jenny. Not that I dislike talking about _you_ – it's just that you're not my girlfriend. No offence."

"Offence taken!" Sally said loudly, putting one hand on her hip, "She's never been more offended in her life."

"You look hot today," Clara said. And that was all she needed to say to remove all of Sally's obnoxious power from the room. Smugly, Clara picked up her mug and sipped her tea, turning back to Esther. "So, what did she have to promise to make you come out today?"

"Lunch," said Esther.

"Mmm," agreed Sally. Clara didn't seem convinced. Esther wasn't convinced either, but had gotten sick of Sally coming into her room and haranguing her. Besides, if an odd clock could tell the right time twice a day, maybe once in a while Sally Sparrow would spend some of the money she didn't have on something other than expensive camera equipment (yeah, fat chance.)

"I'd kill for some lunch," Clara said a little absently, drinking more tea. They were both staring at her. She swallowed. "What?"

"When you say, 'kill for some lunch…'" Sally began slowly. Clara glared at her.

"Not a liquid lunch," she said, "I've got a plentiful supply of human blood, don't you worry your pretty, pale neck. And I'm not going to attack anyone with Esther around. She's already killed me once. I've seen the scar."

"That was a last resort," Esther defended herself. Clara shrugged, minimal regard for her Other Self. Sally crossed her arms and went to lean on the one of the bookshelves, which covered the majority of the large window. There was one shaft of sunlight that got through above it, high enough that Clara could duck underneath it.

"I've never even _tried_ to drink blood from someone, I'm not going to start now when the Lightning Girl is here."

"Should you be talking about this so loudly? Isn't Dylan in the dark about everything?" Esther self-consciously lowered her voice when she asked this.

"Oh, he's not listening, he's swearing at the instructions for his shelf," Clara said. Esther couldn't hear a thing from upstairs. "Anyway, I'll tell you something spooky," this she addressed to Sally, and winked at her. Sally raised her eyebrows expectantly. "In French they don't say 'love at first sight', they say _coup de foudre_ , which-"

"Directly translates to 'bolt of lightning,'" Sally supplied.

"God, look at her, finishing my sentences," Clara said to Esther, "She's such a romantic."

"It's the sensation of love at first sight being likened to being struck by a bolt of lightning," Sally went on to explain to Esther, as though Esther didn't understand already what they were getting at. But she most certainly was not going to fall in love with Dylan Danvers, of all people, and she happened to think that 'love at first sight' was a lie people like Clara told themselves to justify their chaotic behaviour, spreading venereal diseases without a care in the world and whatnot.

"This is _so_ not worth lunch."

"Speak of the devil," Clara said, "He's coming downstairs. I can smell him." Esther didn't think she had ever been less excited about something in her entire life. Even when she knew she was going to die; at least then there had been an element of mystery about the afterlife, but it turned out the afterlife was an almost instantaneous moment of complete darkness before she was being dragged out of a waterlogged coffin in Arlington National Cemetery without any skin.

"Smell him? God, you're creepy," Sally shook her head. Clara grinned at her, which always freaked Esther out. She still wasn't used to seeing such a menacing set of fangs in an otherwise human face. She had four of the things, two on top and two smaller ones on the bottom, and they all looked dangerously sharp. Were they venomous? Is that how vampirism was spread? It was how it worked in _Twilight_ , but how true to life was _Twilight_? Probably not remotely, now that she thought of it.

Now they heard Dylan coming down the stairs, and Esther could have sworn she heard Clara curse under her breath when he appeared. Judging by the confusion on Sally's face, she heard it too, and they saw Clara clench her fists. It was only when Esther actually _looked_ at Dylan that she noticed he was nursing his thumb, which was obviously bleeding. What had Clara just been saying about never trying to attack anybody…?

"Look at this, I got a bloody nail in my… oh," he realised he and Clara weren't alone. Esther went to lean on the desk right in front of Clara, closer to her and therefore better to make a move if she tried anything _bitey_.

"'Bloody' being the operating word in that sentence," Sally quipped.

"God, not blood. I can't stand blood," Clara said. It was the single fakest thing she had ever said. "The sight of it just makes me, uh…" she was staring at his thumb.

"Are you alright, Clara?"

"She's just faint. From the blood," said Esther, "She's got a real thing about it. Has to close her eyes when she changes her tampons." Sally looked at her like she was an idiot.

"Why is it that the only thing women ever talk about is periods…" he grumbled, then seemed to finally notice Esther as being someone he did not know. "Sorry, who are you?"

"This is Esther, I've told you about her. She's basically my maid, only one you don't have to pay," Sally introduced.

"That's a slave," Esther pointed out, "We just live together, I'm not her maid." Clara moved quite suddenly, which captured the attention of both Spooks, though she was only reaching for her bag. She found her flask and unscrewed the cap to drink from it. Good, Esther thought, now maybe they wouldn't have to cover up Dylan Danvers' sudden and unexplained death, where he had 'tripped' in such a way that caused his throat to be ripped out with, mysteriously enough, not a single drop of blood being spilled.

"Sally was just saying about how she might buy something," Clara said once she had drunk enough blood from her flask to satiate her appetite, screwing the lid back on tightly and setting it down on the counter next to her tea where she could get at it quickly.

"Really?" asked Dylan, still holding his thumb.

"Oh, you know me," Sally smiled.

"Exactly," he said, meaning he knew she was definitely not going to buy anything. Then he turned his focus to Esther again, who was jealous of Clara's ability to remain magically unseen if she just stayed still. _Please don't ask me out, please don't ask me out_ , she thought desperately to herself. He opened his mouth to speak, Clara still fixated on his bleeding thumb (he should really do something about that), but Sally spoke first.

"So, remind me, Esther – is 'asexual' part of the long LGBT acronym?"

"Uh…" she faltered.

"I'm pretty sure it is," interjected Clara, "When you include the plus. _LGBT+_. There's definitely an 'A' in there, I think it lumps asexual and aromantic together."

"Well, yeah, it's _LGBTQIA_. Then a D and P and… I don't know. It's hard to keep track."

"I know," said Clara, "That's the worst thing about being queer. Having to learn an entire second alphabet. And the whole thing where in some places it's punishable by death."

"Is it?" asked Dylan, surprised.

"Still illegal to be gay in over seventy countries. There was a news report about it this week, Jenny got really angry."

"Is Jenny gay, then?" Dylan asked. Immediately, he realised what a stupid question that was. Sally and Esther exchanged a look of disbelief.

"She's been fucking me for months, so I hope so," said Clara, picking up her tea again. Esther flinched when she swore, but Sally laughed.

"Are you gonna get a band-aid?" Esther asked Dylan.

"I think you'll find it's a _plaster_ in this country, darling," Sally quipped. Esther glared at her.

"Are you not from around here?" Dylan asked. Again, the regret was an immediate reaction she saw in his eyes.

"How much blood have you lost out of that pinprick, mate?" Sally asked him, "You're asking some awful questions."

"I'm from Virginia."

"Which is fitting," Sally saw a golden opportunity and leapt for it, "Because she's still a vir-" A spark of electricity burst out of the lightbulb – the switched-off lightbulb – in the shade above them, zapping Sally Sparrow right in the side of her neck and stopped her from finishing the word. "For f… _ah_ …" she hissed in pain, clamping a hand over the wound, glowering furiously at Esther.

"Jeez, that light fixture sure is faulty," Esther said innocently. Dylan looked up at it, suspicious.

"It's never done that before," he said.

"Does it to me all the time," Clara covered for her.

"You've never mentioned."

"No, because I… like it," she lied.

"You… like it? Being electrocuted?"

"It's my thing," she said stiffly. She was clearly full of it, but Esther wasn't sure Dylan could tell. An air of awkwardness grew in the room in the wake of this comment, until Sally took it upon herself to change the subject.

"Seriously, Dylan, you're getting blood all over the carpet. And you wonder why you don't have any customers, or a girlfriend."

"Whoa," said Clara, "Harsh. You haven't got a girlfriend either."

"I've got you, you're just as clingy." Clara glared at her; she was still rubbing her neck.

"Do you have to flirt?" Esther grumbled.

"We definitely weren't flirting."

Clara shrugged, "I was." Now Sally looked uncomfortable.

"Yeah…" Dylan began awkwardly. Esther tried to pretend she hadn't noticed him look pointedly at _her_ when the word 'girlfriend' was used. She stared at her feet. She was never going to be that boy's _anything_. Except maybe his friend if he turned out to actually have some redeeming qualities – but so far? Zilch. Dylan cleared his throat. "So, anyway, I'm closing the shop for the rest of the day."

"Oh, really?" Clara eyed his bleeding hand.

"I've got to get these shelves built and I need more space upstairs so I'm going to have to clear out some boxes and put them down here for the day," he explained.

"Do you want my help?" Clara asked this to be polite, quite obviously; she did not want to help.

"Not when you're so squeamish around blood."

"Good point," said Sally quickly, "Best you stay away from blood."

"I'm not paying you for the time off, though."

"I mean – that's fine," she was indifferent, "Whatever. It's just money. How important is it _really_?"

"I'd say it's quite important," Esther commented.

"You're American, of course you think money is important," Sally quipped. Esther scowled.

"Adam Mitchell wouldn't even notice if I stopped paying rent," Clara said. Did she have no integrity? Esther stopped herself – what was she thinking? Of _course_ Clara had no integrity; she had slept with a married woman as part of a bet with said woman's husband. "But, yeah, god, you're right, the blood. I can hardly think straight because of the red stuff, I mean, it smells so tasty."

"It… excuse me?" Dylan frowned.

"Nasty. I said it smells nasty."

"Sounded like you said tasty."

"Mmm, it does sometimes sound like that," Clara said, nodding unconvincingly.

"It's her accent, she's northern," Sally said.

"So am I, and it sounded like she said tasty," Dylan persisted.

Sally paused for a few moments, then said, "Sorry, what was that? Didn't quite understand it. I think it's your accent."

"She definitely said nasty. And that's a _nasty_ injury, you'd better tend to it," Esther said, "Before someone has to come along and kiss it better." They all stared at her. "I mean – not _me_. I don't mean _me_. I wouldn't – kiss – I – nope. That's how you catch hepatitis. Did you know half a billion people globally are estimated to be infected with hepatitis? Hepatitis C alone causes eighty-six thousand deaths a year. And it's sexually transmitted, too."

"It is!?" Clara exclaimed, "Shit…"

"Not even going to ask," Sally shook her head. "Do another one, Esther."

"Two-percent of all adults in the world are living with chronic hepatitis C," said Esther.

"Isn't she sexy?" Sally teased Dylan.

"…I'm going to go find a plaster… the first aid kit is in the cellar… you take the rest of the day off, Clara… Esther…" he turned and walked away.

"Sally," Sally said for herself, since he didn't say her name. He also didn't look back, and slunk away to the staircase into the cellar. As soon as he left Clara went for her flask again and chugged another big gulp of human blood. "Nice going there with the hepatitis. Now he definitely won't try to shag you, he probably thinks you're diseased. Although, Clara's definitely diseased and people still sleep with her."

"Nice one," said Clara.

"Thanks."

Somebody banged on the front door. Not particularly loud, and not a sound that could be considered a knock, but someone certainly touched the door for some reason.

"Weird smell out there…" Clara said, perplexed. Intrigued, Esther went and opened the front door of the shop while Clara went about putting her things in her bag. Sally didn't move from her position leaning against the bookshelf. When she opened it, the cold air rushed in, but she couldn't see anybody outside. Not at that time on a weekday, most of the villagers were Followers and it was about the time when they went for their religious service – i.e., getting brainwashed by alien radio broadcasts. The town square looked deserted, but there was something stuck to the door, a piece of paper. She took it down and recognised it as the same flyer that Sally had slipped on in their garden, only this one was intact and had been freshly slapped on there.

"Is that the same as the one in our garden?" Sally peered at it.

"Uh-huh. It says _Dorian Reid's Travelling Sideshow of Curiosities_ , here all week, open eight until two."

"Eight until two? So it's nearly closed?"

"No, that's PM. Eight at night until two in the morning."

"Where?"

Esther scanned the page, "No address." She passed it to Sally.

"What was that you two were saying earlier about lunch, then?" Clara asked, "Since I'm free now, and I fancy a sandwich, and I also fancy that really fit girl who just started working in the cupcake shop _next_ to the sandwich café and I think she'll get me off if I nip in to talk to her. And give me free cake."

"Why do you have to say that?" Esther asked her disapprovingly, "Just say you want to go see Jenny."

"And get us all free cake, that's the important part," Sally added, scanning the page to try and find any information Esther may have missed on the black-and-gold flyer. But she couldn't find anything. The flyer had almost no information, terrible advertising. "Look, whatever, let's just go before Dylan comes back and Esther carries on seducing him. She'll break out the syphilis statistics in a minute, and I'm not quite in the mood yet today to lose my will to live." Neither Clara nor Esther had any objection to that.

"If Sally wants sandwiches, since she's paying," Esther said as Sally folded up the paper flyer and put it in her pocket for some reason. "What were you thinking about lunch?"

"Oh, I was thinking of lunch in more of an abstract sense," Sally said as she held the door open for them to leave, now that Clara had put on her coat and dragged her umbrella out. It wasn't even sunny _or_ raining, but she still had her trademark black umbrella. Esther thought in a few decades it would be impossible to tell the difference between Clara Ravenwood and Morticia Addams. Although famously, Morticia Addams had quite the screen presence.

"You were what?"

"Like, it's an ambiguous lunch. Conceptual. I mean, what _is_ lunch, really?"

"Ugh. I knew you weren't going to pay for any food."

"I'll buy you lunch," Clara offered her, "Because you covered for me with the blood and had to put up with Dylan."

"Hey – I covered for you with the blood too, and I put up with Dylan way more than she does," Sally argued.

"Yeah, but – you're kind of obnoxious."

"And to think! I was _this close_ to letting you sleep with me, and now you won't even buy me a sandwich," she said, holding up her thumb and forefinger a few millimetres apart.

"Implying what? That you _would_ sleep with me if I bought you a sandwich? You're some kind of sandwich prostitute?"

"You're the one who gets way too excited about mayonnaise," Sally snapped.

"You do kind of… like mayonnaise a lot," Esther added.

"Yeah, okay, sure," Clara waved her away without listening to what she was saying, her eyes fixed on the cake shop next to the sandwich shop. It was only over the road. She dug around in her pocket until she found an orange ten-pound-note in her pocket, "Here, just use this and get whatever. I'll have Coke and a sandwich with literally any combination of ham and-or egg and salad. With extra mayo." Of course, extra mayo. She was nothing if not consistent.

"Cool, thanks," said Esther as Clara vanished into the cake shop to steal Jenny away from whatever she was baking.

"I don't think we can get food for all three of us with just a tenner," Sally commented.

"It's not for you. This is why I keep telling you to claim unemployment benefits-" Esther began on a tired old spiel, but Sally was never going to listen to her, as she pushed open the door for the sandwich shop and the bell tinkled. In spite of the daily afternoon brainwashing service, the shops were all still open, as Oc'thubha would never deny anybody a nice sandwich for lunch. So there was someone in there, in the back, listening to the radio broadcast mysterious static containing the word of an extra-dimensional god monster. Esther rang the bell, and then she almost fainted when she saw what Sally Sparrow took out of her pocket: actual money. _Cash_. She genuinely could not remember if she had ever seen Sally buy _anything_.

"I'm not going to become a dole dosser."

"You're gonna be homeless sooner or later." The woman who worked there came out to take their orders and make three sandwiches, a goofy smile on her face and a glazed look in her eyes.

"You wouldn't have the heart to let me end up homeless, I'm your best friend," said Sally.

"Darn it, that's true…" Esther grumbled. Sally smiled at her. "You know, I actually moved in with my best friend from college after we graduated and the whole thing went completely downhill. That was a pretty bad time in my life, actually – then mom died and I ended up moving in with Sarah for a while to help her get through it. And then I answered a recruitment ad to be a data analyst for the CIA, and the rest is history."

"What _was_ your degree in? Or – what is it your lot say? What was your major? We don't have majors here."

"Really?"

"Nope. Not at UCL, at least, where I went before I dropped out."

"I majored in Computer Science," Esther said, picking up the two paper bags with her and Clara's sandwiches in them to carry them over to a table by the window, one which happened to have a chair nestled in a shadowy corner for Clara, while Sally took her own sandwich and three cans of Coke. "What about you?"

"Guess," she said wryly.

Esther paused and thought for just a few seconds while she sat down, then suggested, "Philosophy?"

"Bingo. Is it that obvious?"

"Well, you're unemployed."

"Ha, ha. I'll tell you who else is unemployed – the Queen. And you don't hear anyone going on at her to get a job."

"You do, they're on the news all the time."

"Oh, sure, because I'm really going to listen to _you_ when it comes to British politics."

"Hey, I pay attention to what's going on in this foreign country I'm forced to live in," Esther argued, opening her can of Diet Coke. Clara also had Diet Coke, only Sally had regular because she was _always_ complaining about how she thought Diet was disgusting. It happened every time they got takeaway together, there was an argument about what drinks to get, and Jenny was always useless because she just stayed neutral and agreed with everybody.

The shop's bell tinkled again and Clara had returned to them, most notably _without_ any baked goods. Sally was quick to pick up on this.

"Oi, where's the promised cupcakes?" she interrogated Clara as she pulled out the chair in the corner and sat down.

"Hmm?" Clara asked, picking up her Coke. Sally squinted at her.

"You know your lipstick is all smudged?"

"…Is it?"

"Yes."

Clara shrugged, "Well, what do you expect? I haven't got a reflection. I'll get Jenny to fix it, she's meeting us in a few minutes. With cakes. Taking her lunch break."

"How's she gonna fix it? Lick it all off?"

"Gross!" Esther exclaimed, "I'm trying to eat here!"

"She will wipe it with a napkin, just like I would if I could see my own face in a mirror." Clara turned her attention to her lunch while Esther worried about there only being three chairs at their table, and it being a very small table. Was there room for a fourth if Jenny arrived?

"So, what do you think of the Queen?" Esther asked Clara.

"Pardon?"

"The Queen."

"…Anything specific?"

"Don't bother her with all that," Sally said.

"Sally was saying that you never hear anybody going on at the Queen to get a job."

"Her job is running the country."

"Her job is doing fuck all," began Clara, "Except being a symbol of an outdated and oppressive neo-colonial hierarchy. Basically, yeah, we pay taxes – well, you don't, because you haven't got a job, but I do – and that money goes to some poncey old lady and her rich grandkids so that they can go around cutting ribbons and forcing us all to watch pre-recorded speeches every Christmas."

"What – you don't watch the Queen's speech?" Sally asked in horror.

"No."

"So you want to abolish the monarchy?"

"I can't say I actively think about it, but if they weren't there I wouldn't really care. It's all bullshit, isn't it? 'Blue blood' – archaic. You've probably got some blue blood in you, no doubt," Clara quipped.

"Me? Not a chance."

"Oh yeah?" It didn't look like Clara believed her, but immediately after this she became distracted and turned her attention towards the door. It took only a moment for them to see why, when Jenny entered, grinning and carrying a decent-sized cardboard cake box. Again, Esther thought of the problem about the chairs, and went to shuffle closer to Sally so that there was room for a fourth at the table. There was no need for this, however, as Jenny just sat down in Clara's lap, which Esther thought was _way_ too much PDA to say they were just having lunch.

"Have I missed much? You three been having lots of fun without me?" She put the box down on the table, Sally's eyes fixed on it. Clara looped an arm around Jenny's waist and just continued eating her sandwich.

"They've been talking about politics," Esther explained.

" _Politics_? How boring."

"Sally's trying to pretend she's not as posh as she actually is," Clara 'explained.' Esther hadn't thought _that_ was what the conversation had been about.

"I'm not," Sally maintained, "Why do you even think I'm posh?"

"Do you mean, apart from _everything_ about you?" Clara questioned.

"You _were_ just telling me about people you went to school with who had country houses with gardens bigger than this entire village," Esther commented, taking another bite of her sandwich. Sally shot her a glare.

"Whose side are you on?"

"Are there sides?"

"There are definitely sides," Clara said firmly, having to lean around Jenny to maintain her stake in the conversation. Esther looked at Jenny, who rolled her eyes to indicate that she also thought that Sally and Clara were both being ridiculous. But Sally and Clara were generally very ridiculous when they were in the same place. "You have to take the side _against_ the person who grew up in some National Trust country manor."

"I did not grow up in a country manor," Sally said pointedly.

"Where did you grow up?"

"In a house, in Westminster."

" _Westminster_? See. She's a massive toff."

"A what?" Esther asked. Nobody answered her. Jenny wasn't listening at all, in the midst of all this she had slyly managed to steal Clara's sandwich out of her hand, and Clara was much too distracted to notice.

"She's probably a Tory."

"Whoa! That's too far," Sally said sharply, "I'm definitely not a Tory."

"Probably a Thatcherite."

"I'll have you know that basically all of my family on my mother's side is Irish – you really think that an Irishwoman would have raised her only child to think it's _okay_ to support Thatcher?" Sally shook her head and drank more Coke. "Alright, so maybe I did grow up in an Edwardian townhouse with twelve bedrooms and a nanny-"

"You _what_?" exclaimed Esther.

"-but that doesn't mean I'm a Tory. My upbringing does not affect my ability to feel basic human empathy."

" _Twelve bedrooms_?" Esther repeated, "In _London_? And you were an _only child_?"

"It's an old house, it's been in my family for generations. How many bedrooms did _your_ house have?"

"Two," said Esther, "Mom was in one, Sarah and I in the other."

"I lived in a cave on my own," Jenny interrupted, beaming, "And then in a shack in a swamp on my own. I had to fight off alligators and I got bitten by a rattlesnake."

"Why are you smiling about that?" Sally asked her. She shrugged.

"Where's my sandwich gone?" Clara asked, staring around the café, in which they were still the only four people. She cast Jenny an accusatory glance.

"What?" Jenny asked innocently, Jenny who had just eaten the remainder of Clara's sandwich in full view of both of the Spooks.

"Did you-"

"Do you know your lipstick is smudged?"

"You did that."

"I'll fix it," she said, picking up a napkin from the table and lifting Clara's chin gently with her other hand. And now Clara was off in her own little world, leaving Esther to try her best to ignore them and talk to Sally.

"I'm confused," she said.

"About what? This isn't about putting vinegar on chips again, is it? I keep telling you it's normal and everyone does it."

"No, it's just… I don't know… isn't Thatcher, like, an icon, or something?"

"An icon of what? Being the most universally hated woman to ever grace the stage of British politics? She took away free milk from primary school children. How evil do you have to be to steal _milk_ from _children_? Milk isn't even expensive, per gallon it's cheaper than water. They literally call her 'Thatcher the Milk Snatcher' – that's a fact. You can look it up."

"I thought she stood up for what she believed in?"

"Yeah, standing up for what _she_ believed in led to ten Irish political prisoners starving themselves to death during a hunger strike three decades ago – not to mention everything with the Falklands and crippling the industries of Northern England."

"What about, y'know, feminism?"

"She actively hated feminism and women's lib and was very outspoken about how women don't belong in politics. Didn't have a single woman in her cabinet. And you'll have to ask Clara about Section 28." Mention of this, whatever it was, caught Clara's attention. Jenny had just about finished fixing her messy lipstick by this point, anyway, and had probably been forgiven for her exploit where she had stolen Clara's lunch.

"What's Section 28?" Esther asked carefully.

"Where they made it illegal to 'intentionally promote homosexuality.' Which was brilliant because this was 1988, you know, AIDS had just become a major thing in the past decade. It sort of banned raising awareness of how to practice safe gay sex in schools, unis, and communities because to teach people how to be safe was 'intentional promotion.' But then, I'm not entirely sure the Reagan administration were doing much better when it came to AIDS," Clara said. Esther knew that was true. "The point is, she was an evil subhuman witch and that's why my dad had a special bottle of champagne locked away in a cupboard waiting for when she died."

"Kind of tasteless," said Esther.

"Actually it was very nice champagne, I know that because I drove all the way back to Blackpool to join him and my uncle. My uncle was a miner," she added.

"I think my parents had a bottle of port," Sally mused, "It's probably still in the house somewhere."

"Did they not drink it?" Clara frowned.

"I mean, they died eleven years ago," said Sally. Clearly, Clara had absolutely no idea about this, and was mortified and apologised immediately. Esther turned all of her attention back to her Coke, "Maybe I'll try to find it the next time I end up back in London."

"Wait, you'll just walk back into your old house? What about the people who live there now?" Esther frowned.

"No one lives there," Sally said, "I'd know if they did, it's my house."

"…You still own the house? The big townhouse? With the twelve bedrooms? You own a twelve-bedroom house in Westminster, one of the most expensive boroughs of London to live in, and yet you live up here with Esther?" Clara questioned, "You don't even lease it out? It's just gathering dust? Why do you never have any money when you're obviously rich?"

"I'm not rich!" she protested, "It's my only asset, and I'm not selling it, but it has… sensitive memories, alright? Ones I'm not going to talk about over lunch with _you_ while you have a woman on your knee. All the money I was left when they died ended up funding a very expensive wedding I never actually had and the purchase of a shop that basically went bust during the recession, and everything that _wasn't_ left to me went to charity or other family members."

"Is this why you won't claim benefits? Because you'd have to pay taxes for the extra bedrooms in a huge house you don't live in?" Esther asked.

"That's absolutely not the reason," Sally obviously lied, "Why are we all interrogating me? Why don't you have a go at Jenny for something?"

"What have I done?" Jenny frowned.

"I don't know – you're wearing a t-shirt with the Nasa logo on it?"

"It's ironic. And anyone who has a go at me doesn't get any cupcakes," Jenny quipped, now stealing Clara's can of Coke to drink out of, which Clara also seemed oblivious to. "And they're special cupcakes, too, they have little flying saucers on them made of icing, not for sale. Specially for you lot."

"Mmm, well," Clara said, "If they're specially for all of us I'm going to get something specially for _me_." She pushed at Jenny until she stood up so that Clara could stand too, then Clara dragged her closer and stuck a hand into the back pocket of her jeans, a motion Esther looked away from immediately.

"What're you – hey! That's my money!" Jenny protested. Clara had drawn out a fiver.

"And that was _my_ sandwich and I only had two bites of it," she said, slapping Jenny's behind.

"Did you have to do that!?" Esther exclaimed, appalled, "In public!?"

"Do you want more Coke?" Clara asked her. Her way of apologising without apologising. Jenny was scowling.

"…Yeah, okay."

"All that sugar's bad for you," Sally said to Esther, Clara going to ring the bell for service. Jenny sat down in Clara's chair. Esther didn't pay her any mind.

"Jen, tell them what you told me. About the flyers," Clara entreated.

"Oh, yeah," Jenny said, taking a folded-up piece of paper from a different pocket to the one the cash had been in and spreading it out on the table. Yet another identical advertisement for Dorian Reid's Travelling Sideshow of Curiosities. "They're all over town. Every building in the village has one – Maggie said they put _three_ through her letterbox this morning. But nobody's seen anyone handing them out, that's the weird part. All of them just appeared out of thin-air. I took one down earlier, this one, and then had to go out and get some more milk and by the time I got back there was another one on the door. I didn't see anybody, and it's broad daylight out there."

"It's foggy," Esther pointed out.

"Sounds spooky," said Sally, listening. Jenny smiled and nodded.

"Oh, god…" Esther groaned, "Look, it hasn't even got an address or a location or anything."

"It's in code," Jenny said, "They do it with pictures, it's easy, don't you see the image in the background?" She held it up in front of the light coming through the window and faintly Esther could see more shapes than had been initially visible in the shadows. She saw a grinning face without any features and a distraught face without any features – a pair of theatre masks. "The Blacklight Society used to use tricks like this to reveal the location of the auctions to punters." Clara returned, pulling up a fourth chair to Esther's relief and sitting at Jenny's side. She passed Esther her second drink.

"The what society?" Sally questioned.

"Thieves' guild I used to run with," she said, putting the flyer back down on the table.

"So this is where? In a theatre?" Esther asked, "Does Hollowmire even _have_ a theatre?"

"It's got a cinema, The Aurora Picture House," Sally said, "It was converted into a cinema in 1935, I think, when people stopped caring so much about vaudeville."

"It's a shame, I used to love vaudeville," Jenny said with an air of nostalgia. Then she turned to talk to Clara, "We should go to a vaudeville show some time."

"If you're going to dress up for it, then sure. I won't complain," Clara smiled.

"Are we invited?" Sally asked.

"If you also get done up," Clara decided, "Put on a nice dress; I've never seen you in one."

"I'd certainly wear one if the occasion desired it."

"You should go to the, uh, 'Travelling Sideshow of Curiosities,' though," Jenny said, "I'd be interested to know if it's anything worth shouting about."

"What do you mean? Do you not want to come?" Clara asked.

"No, I don't like them. I always worry they'll try to kidnap me and use me as an exhibit – _the astounding girl who can't die_. It's terrible how immortality can make you trapped sometimes."

"Yeah, living forever, what a pain," Sally said dryly.

"It's not about living forever – you don't understand because you've never been brought back to life," Jenny said.

"Yeah, it's not so great," said Esther. Clara mumbled her agreement, her mouth full of sandwich.

"You three don't need me – we'll all go vaudeville. I bet I can find some brilliant outfits on the TARDIS the next time I go see my dad. I'm not exactly going to let Clara choose her own outfit on a fancy date."

"What's that supposed to mean?" Clara questioned.

"Give over, everyone knows she basically picks all your clothes out," Sally quipped.

"…Some of us don't have reflections, Sally."

"I thought you had that special alien mirror?" Esther asked.

"It's very small. And she's a nightmare, you don't want to get dressed with Jenny in the room looking at you."

"You're right, I don't," said Esther.

"She sits there tutting. And then she's like – _are you sure about that, Clara? Are you SURE_?" Clara copied Jenny's voice, and Jenny elbowed her in retaliation. "I just let her do what she wants."

"You're totally whipped," said Esther. Clara glared at her, and then Jenny cleared her throat.

"I should be getting back to work, I've got stuff in the oven," she decided, about to get up, but she paused to speak to Clara, "Are we having dinner tonight?"

"Oh, sure, if you like. I'll text you. Maybe we'll all have takeaway, meet you after we go to the thing," Clara said. Jenny smiled and leant in to kiss her goodbye.

"Wait, when did we agree to go to the sideshow?" Esther was confused.

"As soon as Jenny worked out where it is," said Sally, "Come on, don't be boring. What's the worst that can happen? It's just a creepy, poorly-advertised travelling freak show being held in a derelict cinema. Lighten up. _Live a little_."


	9. The Curious Creature: Part Two

_The Curious Creature_

 _-Part Two-_

Night had closed in rapidly on Hollowmire, as it always did. It was a town constantly threatened by looming, outside darkness, in which daylight only erupted for a smattering of hours each day, and even then was filled by the bloated mist which plagued the streets, trying to herald another starless night to wrap itself around the buildings. It was a cloudless evening at half past nine, but the presence of a new moon meant that the gloom was even more vivid than usual.

Esther stood, self-conscious, by a damp and mossy brick wall which had a puddle resting in a dent that had been made in the cement a long time ago. With one of her gloves removed, she held a hand above the water and sent sparks into it. They rippled, blue and white, before dispelling into obscurity and rising as a mild charge in the water vapour hanging in the air. Sally Sparrow was sitting on the wet stairs in front of the Aurora Picture House, against Esther's better advice who told her she would no doubt ruin her coat, with one of her many expensive cameras by her side and playing with her brand-new phone. It was a flip phone with a burner sim and no contract, bought using her limited funds (the limit of which had now been brought harshly into question by their lunch conversation) to replace the iPhone 3GS she had kept for more than six years after its initial release, which had met its demise on the _Night Flyer_ some time previously. She kept flipping it open with a flick of her wrist and then clamping it closed again, doing this repeatedly while passing it from one hand to the other, sometimes checking the time, sometimes going to check the time against a watch she always seemed to forget she didn't wear.

"Could you please stop?" Esther finally gave up, sending a particularly bright shock of sparks into the puddle in front of her in her frustration at Sally.

"Hmm?" Sally looked up, "Stop what?"

"With your phone."

"I wasn't doing anything."

"You were flipping it."

"It's a flip phone," she pointed out. Esther glared at her, and she rolled her eyes. " _Fine_ , I'll do what you want…" She dropped the phone back into her coat pocket and then sat staring into space. It didn't take more than a few moments for her to start tapping out some rhythm on her knees with her hands. Esther caught her eye again, glowering, and she realised what she was doing and stopped. "What's got you in a mood?"

"It's late," she said.

"It's not even ten." Esther didn't say anything else. "You _know_ Clara's always late to everything. Should've prepared yourself. You know, mentally."

"But I told her a specifically slightly earlier time, and she's still tardy. Why don't you text her?"

" _Me_? I haven't got any credit or data."

"How does that work? You never stop posting stuff in that group chat."

Sally smirked, "I thought you have the group chat on mute?"

"I do, but that doesn't mean I don't check it. Sometimes. Rarely. It's just you and Clara – why can't you just talk to her privately?"

"I use my laptop for it," she said, "And the wifi at home. No wifi at this abandoned cinema. And it's because I'd rather talk to Clara where Jenny can see everything that's being said so that she doesn't get paranoid."

"Are you _scared_ of Jenny?" Esther teased.

"Am I scared of her? If she thought that I'd finally given in to my non-existent 'temptations' and got up to no good with her girlfriend, she'd kneecap me. Or break at least a dozen of my bones. Then you'd have to take care of me."

"Take care of you?"

"Make me soup, and tea."

"I made you soup last week, and tea twice today."

"More soup, then. And sponge baths." Esther cringed at the sheer notion. "But seriously, she would hurt me. _Gravely_."

"Who would hurt you?"

They both jumped. Clara Ravenwood had conjured herself out of thin air, side-stepping around the pool of light underneath one of the Victorian lampposts. She reminded Esther of a shadow, a living shadow, something often seen but ignored, intangible. It was ironic given that Clara no longer cast a shadow. She walked with her long umbrella at her side, and if Esther were to squint she might mistake her for Oswin with her cane and her mourning-clothes.

"Your girlfriend," Sally answered, getting to her feet and trying to brush some of the dirt and damp off her coat, "If she thought we were having an affair." She stooped down to pick up her camera and check it over, wiping some condensation from the expensive lens.

"I don't think she would," said Clara, "She'd just… cry."

"She would, and then she'd rip out my vocal chords so that I could never tell anybody about what had happened," Sally said, "No witnesses."

"Sounds kinky – do you think about this a lot?" Sally glared at her.

"Why are you late?" Esther changed the subject. It was a dreadful subject she wanted nothing more to do with.

"Jenny was just, uh… ripping out my vocal chords. As it were."

"You're heinous, you know that? Absolutely heinous." Sally said, disapproving. Clara smiled.

"Had to have a shower before I came out." It was too much information, especially for Esther's liking, but at least the fact that Clara had showered gave her some comfort. She wouldn't have to worry about where Clara's hands had been if she touched her – otherwise she would have to wash her coat. Again. It really wasn't good for the material and she couldn't afford to keep having it dry-cleaned. "There's nobody else here."

"That's what I've been saying," Esther said, "Maybe the flyers are a joke."

"A joke on who?" Sally questioned.

"On us, for showing up. There's no signs for any 'travelling sideshow' out here."

"I forgot that everything has to have signs," Sally said sarcastically, "'Where's the toilet, Esther?' ' _I don't know, there aren't any signs_ ,'" she copied Esther's accent.

"Public bathrooms are almost always signposted, Sally. I'm surprised you don't know that, given how often you need to go." Sally went bright red.

"Would you-! Stop bringing that up! You're _obsessed_ with my toilet habits, it's _disturbing_."

"You two are useless," said Clara, "How do you get anything done? You just stand out here talking?"

"Well what do you think we should do?" Sally challenged.

"Go and open the door and look inside?" Clara suggested. She shook her head at them and walked up the steps to the art-deco-esque doors with tacky, golden-chrome designs across them, pushing them open easily. "I thought you're always breaking into abandoned buildings."

"Exactly," said Sally, following her. Esther followed, too, but she wholly disapproved of the endeavour, "Breaking. I would have looked for a window to climb in, or something."

"You would have looked for a window before trying the front door?" Clara asked, holding the door open. "You ought to get a sonic screwdriver. Maybe Jenny can get you one – she got herself one. Then again, she might not like giving humans access to advanced technology. And especially not you. Maybe Esther."

"What's that supposed to mean?" Sally questioned, "Why aren't I trusted with a magical, space-y door-opening-key-thingy?"

"I think you just answered your own question."

"And speaking of questions, I have one," said Esther, "How come you could just walk right in here?" Before Clara could answer, Sally burst out laughing, leaning against the dusty interior of the decrepit old cinema.

"Oh my god – do you remember that time she couldn't get into our house? And the door was open, and it was raining, and she was out there for, like, five minutes? Because nobody would invite her over the threshold?" she said through her laughter. She was finding it a lot funnier than Esther remembered it being. Clara was grimacing and clenched her jaw.

"It was _twenty_ -five minutes."

"Five minutes, twenty-five minutes, what's the difference?" Sally shrugged.

"Twenty-minutes?"

"Time isn't real."

"I'm super sorry about that, by the way – I was playing _Overwatch_ and had my noise-cancelling headphones on, if I knew she'd trapped you out there I would've come down right away," apologised Esther for the millionth time. It had been a dreadful ordeal, with Clara being trapped outside while Jenny was off getting them dinner for their weekly take-out night. "It was season two comp, before they reduced the length of the matches, so, you know. Took a while. And I was playing Pharah, actually, so it took a lot of focus – the rockets, and stuff. Tricky to aim. The point is, I'm sorry. But I won the match and got my ranking up to diamond. Well, I guess technically it was already diamond, but I maintained it. Sixty-first match of the season. Not that that justifies you being in the rain."

Sally Sparrow began to clap, "Fascinating monologue."

"Ignore her, she's being mean," Clara told Esther, "You talk about your computer stuff if you want. God knows all the while she made me stand in the rain she was also going on about her stupid, expensive camera."

"Hey!" Sally protested, holding her camera.

"I can go buy a disposable camera for a fiver and you couldn't tell the difference between a photo taken with each of them."

"And _you_ wouldn't show up in either," she snapped, "I'm going to look around the abandoned cinema now. Bye." And she walked off in a huff, pushing her way through the broken turnstile to enter the cinema properly. It smelled funny in there, Esther thought. Musty, like mould. It was probably overflowing with asbestos, too. When she had lived in America she hadn't spent half as much time lurking in abandoned buildings. In fact, she would go as far as to say she hadn't spent any time at all lurking in abandoned buildings at all.

"…Do you still have a crush on her?" Esther asked Clara quietly, Clara who had fixed her eyes on Sally as she left them to go to the next room.

Clara paused and thought, then sighed, "Yeah, I guess."

"Even when she's mean for literally no reason?"

"It's kind of hot." Esther stared her.

"I don't think I'll ever understand people."

"Hey, you followed her in here too," then Clara leant over and sang almost under her breath, " _You've got her, under your skin_ …"

"Shut up," Esther grumbled, elbowing her. Clara laughed. "Really, though, why don't you need to be invited?"

"I don't know, I guess because nobody lives here? It's to do with dwellings. I mean, Heidegger drew some pretty interesting distinctions between inhabiting a heartless environment and actually _dwelling_ in it. Although, he was a Nazi, too… look, I didn't make up the vampire rulebook. Now, come on, before Sally sees all the cool stuff first and spoils it," Clara pushed through the broken turnstile, leaving Esther to follow last of all. How did she keep getting into these situations?

Sally had not gotten too far into the building before having to stop, because Jenny had been correct about the secret message printed on the paper flyers after all: there most certainly _was_ an exhibition set up in there. Sally had lowered her camera upon seeing that it was not completely empty, though the three of them were the only guests. It was not a well-maintained building, to say it was most likely grade II listed or higher – or it would be if anybody had bothered to list it, though Hollowmire was a famously illusive and insulated 'society.' As a result of this neglect it had fallen into great disrepair, and the grand circle above them had a gaping hole in its underneath, allowing them to see up to the rows of dark red, moth-eaten chairs. Below, most of the seating had been ripped out, and in its place now stood a dozen or so exhibits, all brought there presumably as part of this sideshow. The large projection screen was ripped in half and had mildew crawling over it. Clara shifted uneasily next to Esther and, again, leant towards her.

"Do you think it smells odd in here?" she asked softly, trying not to make a sound lest she disturb the silent integrity of their environment. Esther didn't want to breathe too much because she was weary of mould spores – after all, twenty-one percent of homes in the UK had problems with mould. That was the issue about being such an old country, Esther thought; inadequate damp-proofing. Even her own house did not fare too well in Hollowmire's persistent foggy conditions, which was half to do with the climate and half because Sally didn't seem to grasp how the central heating was linked to condensation, and preferred to cocoon herself in her dirty blankets rather than actually go down into the cellar and mess around with the boiler.

"It smells like mould," Esther said when she remembered that Clara had actually asked her a question.

"Not mould," said Clara, puzzled, "Something else… when the flyer was delivered to the shop earlier, there was a strange smell…" Esther thought she was probably imagining things. She was a vampire, after all, known for having a powerful sense of smell which could determine many things about a person. Esther thought it probably _was_ just the mould and the damp she was smelling, and maybe there were some rare and pungent varieties festering in the ancient upholstery and exhibits.

"Maybe it's your bad breath," said Sally.

"Excuse me?" Clara asked.

"I think it's all the blood you drink. Bit whiffy. I wouldn't have brought it up, but… maybe you should invest in some mints?" she suggested. She clearly thought that she was being genuinely helpful, in her own brash way (though, Esther could not help but agree with her assessment that Clara really ought to get some mints, because it was true – her breath _did_ have a bit of an _aroma_ to say the least.) Clara now closed her mouth tightly and side-stepped away from Esther, conscious of this new issue that had been brought to her attention.

Esther could hear dripping coming from somewhere – leaky pipes? Rusty plumbing? Probably.

"What's the history of the building, then?" Esther asked Sally.

"The Aurora Picture House was originally called the Cotton Road Theatre, built in the 1890s to bring a bit of big-city culture to this wasteland. Something to do with Oc'thubha, no doubt – it was about the time phone lines started being installed around here, so he could probably achieve a greater sphere of influence. Anyway, the theatre wasn't particularly popular because no good companies generally toured, and it was often just am-dram stuff the residents of the town put on. Sort of, bootleg-copies of plays people went to Leeds and Sheffield to see and re-wrote scripts to from memory. Not very good. Cinema is completely different, much less elitist, because you can just film things and send out reels everywhere – so in 1926 it was converted into a cinema and had the name changed, rumour has it _specifically_ to showcase _The Temptress_ with Greta Garbo. And historically, _The Temptress_ was the first film shown here, so you can't disprove anything."

"Jenny's met Greta Garbo," Clara interrupted.

"…She has?" Esther asked.

"Yeah, when she was living in the 30s. At a film premiere. She talked to her in Swedish, but I don't think she understood the significance at the time."

"Well, anyway. That was 1926. In the 50s, right before the end of Hollywood's golden age, the owner paid to have the whole thing redesigned in this art deco style. And _then_ TV came along, and I suppose with Oc'thubha brainwashing everybody through the TV signals and the radios, they cared a lot less about this cinema. It's been derelict since 1959." Sally approached the torn screen at the front of the room; there was still an old stage there, despite the fact the building hadn't been in use as a theatre for so long. "I have a brilliant idea…" Esther heard her mutter to herself. This made her _incredibly_ suspicious, because Sally's 'brilliant ideas' were usually anything but.

Sally climbed onto the stage and set her camera down on the old, rotten wood, where the varnish had worn away decades ago, and then wandered off in the direction of the old wings. Esther watched her carefully, as did Clara, until she was out of sight.

"Should we follow her?" Clara asked.

"What? _You_? Follow Sally into a darkened, creepy area backstage?" Esther questioned. "She's fine. Living things are basically walking electrical circuits. I don't think she'll go too far."

"What _are_ these exhibits?" Clara said, looking at them. But everything in there was covered over with red fabric, hiding a bunch of cube-shapes. "I don't get it, aren't they supposed to be on show…?" She reached for the corner of one of the sheets, as if she was making a move to remove it. Esther waited with baited breath to see what Clara was going to unveil, but they both jumped upon hearing a clattering echo from Sally's general direction, then a metallic dragging. "Shit. Sounds like Sally's been murdered by a robot."

"Look at this!" Sally exclaimed upon making her grand re-entry, hauling what looked like a large metal lamp with her. It had a lightbulb on top of it sealed in a small, thin cage, with a broken wire trailing off behind her, not plugged into anything. "It's the ghost light. I found it, back there. They use these in theatres all over the place, to appease the spirits of the ghosts alleged to haunt the building. They've got one in the Palace Theatre, on Broadway, where Judy Garland's ghost is supposed to perform."

"That's a myth, they have ghost lights because they kept the gas flow running and they just kept it as a theatre tradition," Esther said.

"Yeah, for the _ghosts_ ," Sally said, "Don't be so boring, come and grab the other end of the wire and light it up, I'll take a photo, it'll look great in here. Ooh, actually, it would be better taken from up there…" her eyes strayed to the circle above them.

"Absolutely not, it isn't structurally sound," said Esther.

"Esther, sometimes you have to take risks to get good shots. Haven't you seen _Rear Window_?"

"I've seen it," Clara interrupted.

"Of course I have," Esther said, taking little notice of Clara, "It's a Hitchcock classic. He broke his leg taking that photo, then he turns into a paranoid pervert and breaks his other leg."

"But he has a hot girlfriend," said Clara.

"He's not actually paranoid though, because the murder _did_ happen," said Sally, to Esther.

"Oh, come on. Sure, but all the evidence gathered is basically circumstantial. They just find her wedding ring."

"There's way more to it than that. Are you going to help me take this photo?" Sally questioned, "It'll look brilliant with this place properly lit up!"

"I haven't felt like _this_ much of a third-wheel since the Doctor found the Master again…" Clara mumbled. They both glanced at her.

"…Were you talking?" Sally asked.

"Didn't say anything important, don't you worry."

"…Right… Esther?"

"I'll think about it," said Esther. She thought it was an awful idea.

"There's that smell again," said Clara, but this time they actually did turn their attention towards her, Sally growing distracted from her mission to take a good photograph of the ghost light. Esther didn't think it would turn out to be very good with all the funny-shaped display cases lined up across the holes in the floor where the seats all used to be. She wondered where they had gone. Sally picked up her camera again and jumped down the two-or-three feet back to the carpeted level with them.

"A smell that isn't your breath?" Sally asked.

"Stop saying that, it's mean," Esther told her.

"What? It could be that," she shrugged.

"Maybe it's the mould?" Esther suggested, trying to be helpful. She was highly concerned about the number of mould spores floating around in the air.

"No," Clara shook her head, "It smells like death."

" _Voila!_ " Like one of Sally Sparrow's spectres, a man had appeared out of nowhere, taking centre-stage behind them, in front of the ghost light as though it was a microphone. "An interesting ensemble here this evening at my attraction. Though, I have to insist, my dear, absolutely no photography. What happens here must stay between us, and us alone." Sally lowered her camera.

It would be an understatement to call this guy creepy. He could well be the creepiest person Esther had ever seen. Eerily tall, wearing a cloak and a top hat and a mixture of black and dark red velvet, he looked exactly like a ringmaster from an old-time circus. He stood there, surveying them all, which make Esther feel especially uneasy. His eyes rested for the longest on Clara, but Sally being the way she was decided it was her job to capture his attention.

"You must be Dorian Reid, then? From the flyers?" she asked with a grin. Esther couldn't work out if she was genuinely excited. Probably – she was that sort of person.

"The very same. Welcome, welcome. I saw you admiring the venue." _Yeah, admiring the asbestos_ , Esther thought but was too polite to say. Dorian Reid jumped down spryly from the stage and approached them. Only Sally didn't seem uneasy – Clara, on the other hand, had grown very strange all of a sudden. And he kept looking at her. "You deciphered my message, how clever of you… keeps the riff-raff out, you see."

"Sure. I hate riff-raff," said Sally, "Nice entrance – how do you do that? Is it wires? It's always wires. Or a smoke machine."

"Do you see a smoke machine?" Reid asked her.

"I feel like being able to see the smoke machine defeats the point of the smoke machine," she said knowingly, though Esther doubted she knew _anything_ about what she was saying. "But, you know what they say, where there's smoke there's a fire."

"There is no smoke," Esther reminded her quietly, "And smoke machines don't make smoke using fire, if a smoke machine is on fire then it's broken."

"But it would still be making smoke," Sally pointed out, "So _is_ it broken?"

"Well – yeah, you're oversimplifying the mechanical concepts that go into manufacturing smoke machines."

"It's a machine and it makes smoke, so how can it be broken if it continues to do that?"

"Well obviously-"

"There isn't a smoke machine," Clara cut them off loudly, "So shut up."

"Someone got out of the wrong side of the coffin this morning…" Sally mumbled.

"What?" Reid asked her sharply, while Clara shot her a glare.

"Uh…" Sally grew awkward under his quite severe scrutiny. Esther came to the rescue, though Sally almost certainly didn't deserve it.

"So what's in these exhibits, then? Anything cool?" she asked. Reid looked down her nose at her, and not just because she was an entire foot shorter than him even wearing high heels (as she almost always was.)

"An American…" he mumbled to himself, then forced a smile, "Yes. Some very 'cool' things. If you'll step this way, and let me show you around my travelling sideshow of curiosities." He turned in a sweeping movement, pulling his cloak with him and reminding Esther bizarrely of Darth Vader. Clara had her arms crossed very tightly by this point, yet despite her obvious unease, she still followed him, and so did Sally, because Sally would do anything to see something weird and spooky.

Reid did not go for the exhibit Clara had been about to pull the cloth from when he had interrupted them, but instead led them towards the front of the room, where he very theatrically dragged another piece of dark red fabric (which matched his outfit now as well as the room's decrepit carpeting) from a completely different glass case and revealed something that wasn't quite as weird as she had been expecting. It was some drawings, some relatively subpar drawings set up in a small circle, framed and propped up; you would need to walk in a circle around the entire exhibit to see all four of them. The one Esther could see was an unusual diagram with a lot of dots and lines, but Sally, next to her, had gasped when she had seen the one in front of her.

"I see you recognise them," Reid said to Sally.

"You do?" Esther frowned.

"Of _course_ , Est. These are the Hills' drawings," she said.

"The what?"

"From the Hill abduction. When they were abducted by a UFO, in 1961. It's only one of the most famous alien abductions _in history_ – it re-popularised the controversies around the Roswell Incident," Sally explained, "They-" Reid cleared his throat incredibly theatrically and for a few seconds longer than any normal person would actually need to clear their throat, and Sally raised her eyebrows at him.

"This is _my_ show," he said.

"…Sure. You go for it," said Sally, somewhat patronisingly. He did not appreciate this.

"Barney and Betty Hill were taken out of time and space one fateful evening, returning from a romantic getaway at Niagara Falls. They stopped their car in New Hampshire to observe strange lights in the sky, when they were captured, by-"

"Nazis," said Clara.

"What?" Esther frowned.

"This drawing," Clara nodded at what was in front of her, and Sally and Esther both walked over to look, Esther taking the long way around because she wanted to stay as far away from Reid as she could. There was something incredibly unusual about him, and the way he _felt_. Electrically. "It looks like a Nazi. Only an alien Nazi." And it did, a thin, alien-esque figure wearing an all-black uniform and a smart black cap, overlooking some kind of balcony.

"Hey," Sally lowered her voice and spoke to Clara, "Didn't your girlfriend live in Germany for a while?" Clara was aghast.

"You – you can't say things like that, oh my god."

"What!? What did I say!?" Sally knew full-well what she had said. "She's got blonde hair and blue eyes-" Clara shushed her very aggressively. " _Fine_ …"

Reid continued, clearly finding Sally Sparrow quite unpalatable, "They were subjected to invasive medical procedures, especially Barney, who rarely liked to discuss his ordeal. After being dismissed by the Air Force and the military, Betty began having dreams, terrible dreams, of her experiences she thought she had forgotten. She wrote extensively about these dreams and drew _this_ map." He indicated the dots and lines Esther had found herself looking at initially, "All pointing to the Zeta Reticuli galaxy."

"That's the same galaxy they use on packets of Space Raiders," Clara pointed out.

"Oh _yeah_ …" Sally realised she was correct, apparently. Esther did not care much for Space Raiders.

"Betty was _stabbed_ ," Reid said 'stabbed' very loudly to re-capture their attention, stamping his foot on the ground when he did (he made Esther jump quite successfully), "By an enormous hypodermic needle, into her naval, which caused her excruciating pain. They underwent extensive hypnotherapy, revisiting the site they were stolen from, to piece together the mystery of their experience. While Barney died in 1969 of a mysterious brain haemorrhage, Betty lived the rest of her life convinced that she had met visitors from another world." While the third drawing was a very basic diagram of a run-of-the-mill flying saucer, the final one – the one Sally had seen first – was considerably more sinister. It was two side-by-side drawings of an alien head, one from the front and one in profile, and despite its large eyes, strange face-shape and lack of ears, it reminded Esther more of a human corpse than an alien. And considering she had once _been_ a human corpse, it struck a nerve.

But they were soon to move on from the bizarre fruits of Barney and Betty Hill's labour, with Reid leading them around the room to another exhibit which was hopefully going to be more impressive than some doodles. After all, it had been the 1960s, LSD had just been invented, who _knew_ what kinds of things people were seeing and then drawing? Surrealist art had been around for decades and nobody blamed _that_ on close encounters of the third kind. Despite the fact she had met aliens and spent time on an alien spaceship, including one that looked _exactly_ like a cliché flying saucer from a B-movie, Esther remained wholly sceptical, as always. _And_ she was getting sleepy, this was about the time she would usually have her bedtime hot cocoa, and she did _not_ like missing her bedtime hot cocoa…

"Perhaps I can entice you to believing in alien life with _this_ genuine specimen," Reid again dragged another piece of fabric away from a glass container, and Esther was horrified by what she saw, because it looked almost _exactly_ like a facehugger. And given what she had heard about one of Jenny's regenerations, she knew that facehuggers did sort-of exist, and given what she knew about the _Alien_ franchise because she was a big fan of it, she knew that they were also incredibly durable. " _This_ is what's known as a-"

"Dream crab," said Clara, stepping away from it.

"It's – what?" asked Esther.

"It's a… dream crab…" she said, "Look, just… that's what it's called."

"It looks like a facehugger."

"Yep," Clara nodded, "It does. But it makes you have dreams."

"Oh no, dreams. God forbid," Sally said sarcastically.

"You're an insomniac, you would say that," Clara snapped at her. Sally glared. Obviously jokes about her insomnia were 'too far', yet everyone else's problems and secrets were fair game.

"Yes," said Reid, obviously getting irritated, yet he was still paying very close attention to Clara, who was doing anything possible to avoid looking at him. "Kantrofarri. They feed on human brain matter, tracing them telepathically, forcing them into a state of euphoric dreaming before they kill them, clamping themselves around their faces." Esther absolutely did not like the way the guy said 'them' about humans…

"Maybe a dream crab got Barney and Betty Hill?" Sally suggested. She was being obnoxious on purpose. Reid was not having it.

"Sal, could you just – be nice?" Esther pleaded with her. It never usually worked, pleading with her. She could be incredibly insufferable when she put her mind to it.

"It's a genuine question…" she mumbled. Clearly lying.

"How do _you_ know about the Kantrofarri?" Reid turned his questioning directly on Clara, opting to just ignore Sally. Probably for the best, and it was what everybody else usually did.

"Long story," said Clara stiffly, "Happened years ago. Don't like to talk about it."

"They can bring up sensitive memories," he said to her, and she met his gaze for a few seconds and then quickly looked away. Sally made a confused face at Esther, who shrugged to indicate that she also didn't understand what was going on. Obviously more than met the eye. Esther was struck with a sudden terror that Clara was going to try and sleep with this Dorian Reid guy, but surely not? Then again, she wasn't good at reading people. Clara took a few steps away from him.

"Is it dead?" Sally asked.

"No," said Reid, "It's in hibernation. Be careful, the more you think about it the more it can sense you." Esther could have sworn she saw it twitch, and going by the way Sally backed away, she did too. Reid smiled, a twisted smile, and draped the fabric back over the top of the case to keep it out of sight and out of mind. Esther hoped it couldn't break through the glass; it seemed like things were getting more authentic as they went along, though the Hill abduction story still remained pretty much a laughing matter to her. "My next item is something unique that will _truly_ astound…" And hopefully something that wouldn't try to eat their brains, Esther thought to herself.

When he revealed the third exhibit in his collection, lain out in the empty theatre, there was a much more significant atmosphere of 'curiosity,' especially compared to so far. It was a large bell jar inside the cuboid, glass cabinet, carefully sealed around the base with an unusual substance she didn't recognise – it reminded her of resin, like the kinds used to temporarily seal breaches in space-bound equipment. But while experimental space resin was, obviously, profoundly interesting, the contents of the bell jar captured Esther's attention. Ethereal, pale blue, like a spectral flame from the inside of a gas lamp, _something_ curled around on itself, a glowing, misty mass. Esther immediately recognised it as a ghost, she could feel the energy inside it, and was awestruck. She placed one of her gloved hands on the glass and leant closer. The ghost twisted and gravitated in her direction, like the fake-lightning inside of a science orb.

"I'm sorry, but, how do you have this?" Esther asked Reid.

"What is it?" Clara asked.

"A ghost," said Esther, holding his gaze.

"Oh, okay!" Sally said loudly, "So now, when it's convenient for you, ghosts are real, but when _I_ say we should go to that derelict hospital in Keighley, you're all like, ' _ghosts don't exist, Sally._ '" She copied her accent again.

"Would you shut up?" Clara ordered her, shaking her head. "This behaviour is appalling."

"…Don't do your teacher-thing on me."

Clara crossed her arms and stared at her.

"Don't make me raise my voice, Sally."

"Why? What are you going to do?" Clara narrowed her eyes. Sally clenched her jaw and they stared each other down for a few moments, before Sally finally looked away and crossed her arms, meaning Clara had won. But Esther didn't care about that, she cared about the ghost. Reid was probably getting sick of them. Or sick of Sally, at least. He was getting increasingly fixated on Clara.

"This is a person," Esther said to Reid, "You can't have a person stuck like this."

"Ah, but you see," said Reid, "This is none other than the ghost of Marilyn Monroe." Sally and Clara dropped their mutual defensive postures now to ogle the swirling mist in the bell jar. But Esther didn't care who it was, she thought it was cruel. Sometimes she could have sworn she saw the mist within form small faces and hands – what had Reid done to that jar to keep the ghost sealed in? It was like one of the traps from _Ghostbusters_ , or the Fenton Thermos.

"So? That's not right. This is a soul, a person, their essence, their last breath," said Esther, putting both hands on the cabinet and examining it.

"Please, don't touch the exhibits," Reid told her coolly. She moved her hands but stayed leaning in close. Something was stopping the spectre within, whether it was Marilyn Monroe herself or not, from using Esther as a spiritual battery, the way other ghosts sometimes did. She was a magnet for the paranormal undead, but something to do with that bell jar and the resin no doubt was stopping it from communicating at all, stopping it from draining her to fuel its own corporeal image.

"This is morally wrong," said Esther.

"And clearly no American has ever done anything morally wrong," Reid mocked.

"I – what? You're gonna hold one person responsible for all of America's crimes?" Esther questioned him, "You're gonna hold Marilyn Monroe prisoner because of spite for America? Do you know what this woman went through? She killed herself and now you're treating her like a trophy, if it even _is_ her."

"I think you'll find the Kennedys murdered her in an elaborate conspiracy," Sally interjected, "The same conspiracy that killed JFK, Martin Luther King, Malcolm X _and_ John Lennon."

"Those are five completely unrelated events that happened within twenty years of each other," Esther argued, "Read a darn book, Sally."

Sally shrugged, "Fine. Believe their lies." Clara scoffed.

"You're so annoying. I don't know why I fancy you," she muttered.

"I wish you didn't," Sally told her.

"Interesting…" said Reid, watching them. Sally frowned.

"It is?"

"And spirits can't feel any pain," he spoke to Esther, ignoring Sally, "So you don't have to worry about her."

"They can feel plenty of pain – the very nature of them is being in a perpetual state of pain," she argued.

"A strange stance from a girl so sceptical about those drawings."

"Let's just say I choose my battles."

"Mmm…" he looked down his nose at her, and then dropped his red fabric back over the jar with the ghost in it, the ghost of Marilyn Monroe, cutting off any type of energy Esther could feel from it. She was liking this less and less – it no longer seemed like a quirky way to spend an evening, looking at Fiji Mermaids and two-headed Siamese twins and other kinds of bogus artifacts. She was seeing first-hand why they had gotten rid of freak shows in the Fifties. "I don't think you'll like my _next_ exhibit much!" he said with a flourish, removing the covering from the largest case in the room, though not the last.

What he revealed made all three of them audibly scream, because it was truly one of the most horrifying things Esther had ever seen in her life. And during the Miracle she had seen a woman stagger around outside of a major airport with her head twisted all the way around so it was backwards; and she'd seen herself, in a mirror, after being brought back from the dead when she'd been rotting underground for four years; _and_ she'd seen a man fall head-first into a meat grinder. But _this_? It took the cake, because it was a severed head. And not just any severed head, the severed, embalmed, waxy head of one of the most frightening-looking men in all of modern history.

"Behold the head… of Grigori Rasputin!" Reid announced.

"Oh my gosh!"

"Jesus Christ!"

"Fucking hell!"

Esther, Sally, then Clara exclaimed together, stepping back. Esther was never going to sleep again. Rasputin had been one of the first casualties of the anti-Tsarist movement of the Russian Revolution, a century ago, and this Dorian Reid had found his body and _chopped off his head_. There was even a black-looking bullet wound in the middle of his forehead, and Esther was glad it was in a glass tank and the smell couldn't escape.

"That is literally the most awful thing I've ever seen," said Esther.

"Yeah, you and me both," said Sally.

"And I've seen you with bedhead."

"Yeah – wait, what?"

"Nothing."

"Are you astounded?" Reid asked them.

"Is this legal?" Clara asked, "He died from being shot, did you cut his head off? Isn't that desecrating a corpse?"

"I found him like that."

"Sure you did," Sally was unconvinced.

"This is very weird," Clara stared at it, "Just… his head."

"John Bentham put it as his last wish to have his body preserved in wax and put on display in a board room in London Hospital," Reid said, then somewhat offhand, "Very unusual fellow when he was alive."

"This wasn't Rasputin's last wish, though, was it?" Clara asked rhetorically.

"What would _your_ last wish be? If you were to die? Would you want people watching you? Would you want to be displayed?" he asked her. There was a pause where nobody knew what to say, Reid fixing his eyes on Clara, who was wholly uncomfortable yet also struggling to look away.

Sally eventually began to slow cap, "Well done. The award for creepiest thing said to anybody ever goes to you, Mr Reid."

"Call me Dorian," he said, staring at Clara.

"I think Mr Reid is fine," Clara mumbled.

"Is he?" Esther eyed him, "I'm not so sure..."

"Can you cover him with the cloth again?" Sally nodded at Rasputin, "He's freaking me out. Marilyn Monroe's ghost is one thing – at least she could sing-"

"Actually she was dubbed quite a lot," said Esther, "My Marni Nixon. I'm surprised you don't know that."

"So am I – is she dubbed in _Some Like it Hot_?" Sally asked.

Esther thought, "Uh… no, I don't think so. It's _Gentlemen Prefer Blondes_ I'm thinking of."

"Huh…" Sally thought about this, "The more you know."

"About something completely irrelevant," Clara muttered.

"Clara! She's right there, show some respect," Sally pointed at the covered glass box where the ghost jar was. She shook her head, faux-disappointed, "Some people…" Then she noticed Rasputin again. "Seriously, wasn't he some kind of crazy, occult hypnotist? He's freaking me out."

"Bleach commercials freak you out," Esther quipped.

"I just don't like how they anthropomorphise the germs," she said, "It makes me feel cruel for cleaning."

"You've never cleaned anything."

"Yes, because I have _empathy_ , Esther, for other _living organisms_. I'm not an ice queen like you – and can someone please cover up the terrifying, dead Russian's severed head?"

"As you wish," said Reid, finally covering it over to their great relief, "But allow me to introduce you to the _pièce de résistance_ of my collection…" He moved like a phantom, practically gliding, over to the final glass box – which just so happened to the box Clara had initially been drawn to and about to reveal before Reid had appeared – Esther counting down the seconds until they could finally get out of there and hoping that Sally had forgotten all about her idea to photograph the ghost light from the circle's balcony. "Here we are. A sight to behold."

With his usual showman's flare, Dorian Reid revealed a stick. A wooden stick. Or, upon further inspection, Esther realised it was a stake, and it was having quite a disturbing effect on Clara. More so than even Rasputin's head had done, like it held some power over her. Reid was watching her for her reaction to it.

"A stake," Sally commented, "Do you think it's rare or well done?" Esther elbowed her. "Ow! What was that for?"

" _Shut up_ ," she hissed.

"What is that?" Clara asked Reid, staring at it.

" _A stake_ ," Sally answered again, "I just said-" Esther now resorted to stepping on her foot to try and get her to be quiet, and she swore under her breath but appeared to finally get the message.

"It was used to slay vampires," said Reid, "More vampires than any other instrument. Some say it's sacred. Carved at the hands of the legendary vampire Countess Elizabeth Báthory herself in the 16th Century, used to kill her own flesh and blood underlings when they were disobedient. Passed down until her death at the hands of a… _rival_ who killed her entire brood, in 1894, in-"

"Whitby," Clara finished his sentence for him, and then she became scared and started to back away from Reid as a twisted and evil smile slid across his face, revealing a pair of menacing, inhuman fangs.

And now Esther knew why he was sending out such a weird vibe, why he had asked for no photographs, and why Clara said the cinema smelt of death – Dorian Reid was a vampire!

"I have to leave," stammered Clara, beginning to walk backwards, "I have to go. Now. Have to get out. Sorry, you two, I just – I can't –" she bumped into the case which held Rasputin's head on her way out but barely seemed to notice, heading for the exist as fast as she could, which was very fast indeed. Sally was no longer finding it within her best interest to think of a clever quip to make, and she and Esther exchanged a nervous glance as Reid watched Clara leave and then turned his gaze on Sally – the only human with fresh blood in the whole building.

"Gosh, I totally forgot, we… are totally gonna miss _8 Out of 10 Cats Does Countdown_ ," Esther said, "One of the few British comedy panel shows I can actually abide by – don't you just love having to do tricky math problems in a set amount of time? And I mean – don't get me started on the spelling. I've actually read all of Webster. Just, for fun. You know. As a time killer. Not killer – don't think about _killing_ , obviously, that's – good bye!" Over the course of this rather embarrassing spiel she had been dragging Sally by her elbow towards the exit, away from the creepy stake and the severed heads and Marilyn Monroe's ghost in a jar.

They finally escaped the Aurora Picture House into the comparably fresh, misty air of Hollowmire, and Esther had never been more relieved to be outside in that rural backwater.

"That bloke was – oh my god – he was a vampire!" Sally exclaimed.

"Yeah – where did Clara go?" Esther scanned their bleak surroundings, but found no sign of Clara Ravenwood, even straining her eyes to account for Clara's ability to blend seamlessly into the shadows.

"I guess she flew off, he must have spooked her – I thought she's never met another vampire? And she doesn't remember being bitten?" Sally asked.

"I don't know, but we need to leave," said Esther, "In case he comes after you, or something. Better get to the house. You know how they need to be invited in."

"I mean, sure, I don't think he'll… god, you don't-? Do you?" Sally was shocked and frightened.

"I don't think we should stay out here and take any risks, now come on, let's just go home. We can… talk to Oc'thubha. He'll be able to do something, he basically mind-controls everybody in a twenty-mile radius," Esther said, motioning for Sally to follow her, "Come _on_ , let's leave. He is _uber_ creepy."

"Shouldn't we check on Clara? Go over there?" Sally asked, following Esther as they walked off briskly, each of them checking over their shoulder every few moments to make sure they weren't being tailed by Dorian Reid (though Esther was sure that he could stay well out of sight if he wanted to; they _needed_ to get home desperately.)

"Jenny said she was waiting for her," Esther said, "They're getting takeout, remember?"

"Do you think that was actually Marilyn Monroe's ghost?"

"It was somebody's ghost," she said, "And it was trapped in there, unable to… pass on, or do whatever it is they do when they stop being here." Cease to exist entirely, she thought, considering she had died before and knew what death was like. Complete and utter obsolescence. "And the crab-thing was still alive, too, I saw it move."

"I think it's best not to think about the crab-thing," said Sally, "He said it has a telepathic connection. What if he lets it out? To… feed? Keep it alive?"

"It could be infinitely-hibernating, like a tardigrade," Esther said, attempting to be logical. "Let's just stay calm. Try to forget about it, and… have some grilled cheese."

"Cheese on toast," said Sally absently, looking behind her.

"What?"

"It's cheese on toast. Not grilled cheese."

"Sure, whatever, hot dairy bread, _whatever_ , I always used to make Sarah and I grilled cheese whenever she got too stressed, so… can you believe that was Rasputin's head? Where do you get something like that?"

"Personally, I can't believe that you _don't_ believe in the Hill abduction," said Sally.

"Oh, come on – it's such a load of bunk."

" _Bunk_? Hardly. Betty Hill's star diagrams are famously realistic, for somebody who didn't know a thing about astronomy. They made a film about it, you know. In the 70s."

"Just because somebody makes a film about something doesn't mean it's real. I mean, what about _Gremlins_? How awful would that be if it was real? We'd all be murdered in our sleep."

"They're sort of cute."

"You'd be the first to go when they end up in the rain or eat past midnight."

"Esther, everybody gets cranky when they're caught in a rainstorm or eat past midnight, it's bad for your morale _and_ digestion," said Sally, "Maybe when it gets after midnight the vampires won't come after us."

"I really don't want to think about us getting attacked by vampires. Look, there's the house. We'll just go inside and have hot cocoa-"

"Hot chocolate."

"Or _whatever_ , and then just… go to bed. And try not to think about any of this. Especially not Rasputin's severed head."

"Yeah," said Sally as Esther took out her keys and began to unlock the door, "Good plan."


	10. The Curious Creature: Part Three

_The Curious Creature_

 _-Part Three-_

One of the things she hated most in the world was getting woken up in the middle of the night. When she had worked for the CIA, she had often been forced onto night shifts, and then woken up by phone calls from Rex Matheson whenever he needed her to fill out a requisition on his behalf, or from Charlotte Wills whenever she got into a fight with her girlfriend, or from Noah Vickers whenever he wanted to play _WoW_ or _Battlefield_. Remarkably, that was actually one of the less annoying things about living with Sally Sparrow, she got woken up _less_ and she didn't have to keep switching her sleep schedule around depending on her shifts. Except for that time Sally had tried to burn their house down under the influence of a mind-controlling top-hat. Or that other time when the Doctor and Donna Noble showed up and they discovered the truth about Oc'thubha. But on the whole, she actually slept better in Hollowmire than in Washington.

Apart from that night. Because that night somebody was throwing stones at her window like she was a character in a 1980s teen movie, and she did _not_ appreciate it. It was not the 1980s anymore, no matter how behind the times Hollowmire was, and she needed her regular eight hours. She lifted her eye-mask and sat up in the dark, confused and annoyed, when another bang struck the glass outside. They were growing progressively more violent, as if the missiles were getting larger. Esther put her mask down on her end table and hauled herself out of bed to approach the window, when she heard movement upstairs; Sally was awake. And when she paused to listen, she realised that Sally was coming downstairs, very slowly. Rather than go over to the window, she instead went to the door, meeting Sally on the landing and taking her by surprise.

"Why are you awake?" Sally whispered.

"Because someone's throwing rocks at the house – what's going on?" Esther asked. It was freezing on account of them not having the heating on in the middle of the night, and she wished she had just put in her earplugs and gone back to sleep in her nice, warm bed.

"It's Clara," said Sally as quietly as she could, "I think."

" _What_? What time is it? And why are you up – aren't you taking your pills?"

"Esther, I'm like, on the brink of passing back out," Sally said, irritated, "I am so exhausted, but she's making a lot of noise, and she keeps trying to call me and text me. Honestly, I think she's gone crazy. Look." Sally was holding her phone and showed it to Esther, where she had an incredible ninety-six missed calls and two-hundred-and-thirteen unread text messages. "She's also left me thirty voice mails I haven't listened to."

"What do all the messages say?" Esther asked. Sally took her phone back and opened them. Sally scrolled quickly and frowned, then shook her head and gave Esther the phone. It was primarily emojis, every emoji, in random orders, along with begging messages about how she desperately _needed_ to talk to Sally. "What's she talking about?"

"I don't know."

Something threw its whole weight at the door downstairs and made it rattle, which alarmed Esther – who had long been of the assumption that their front door was not structurally sound. The letterbox was pushed open by thin, pale fingers.

" _Sally_? Are you in there?" called Clara Ravenwood, "I have to talk to you. Just let me in." Clara tried to force her whole arm through the slit but got stuck when she reached her elbow. Still, it was unpleasant watching her hand flail around blindly, trying to find the door handle. "I can hear you both."

"Yeah, I mean, I think you might be onto something with your 'she's gone crazy' theory," said Esther, watching Clara retract her hand, "What if she breaks a window with those rocks? Maybe we should let her in? I don't want to lose my deposit."

"And I don't want to lose my _blood supply_ – there's a crazy vampire outside and you want to invite her in?"

"I just-"

"This is how they get people! You might wonder, how does anyone get killed by vampires when they needed to be invited into buildings? And it's because of idiots like you who worry about security deposits and single-glazed windows. _Let the vampire in_ – god. To think I listen to the things you say."

"You never listen to anything I say."

"No, because you say stuff like that." Her phone began to buzz in her hand as Clara texted her again, and then Esther heard another bang on the window in her room that made her jump. "…Maybe she _is_ going to break a window. But she still couldn't get in. Could she?"

"I don't know," said Esther, "Maybe not? I'm sure she can't?" Then Sally's phone started to ring again, and the name 'Mona the Vampire' appeared on the screen. "Answer it."

"Answer it? Why?"

"She might tell you what she wants – look, I'll answer it," Esther took the phone, despite Sally's protests, and accepted the call, "What's up, Clara?"

" _Can I talk to Sally?_ "

"Sure, if you tell me what you want."

" _To talk to her_."

"But what about?"

" _I just need to._ "

"Can this way until it's not five o'clock in the morning?"

" _I could get in if I broke a window_."

"Uh…" Esther faltered. Was that true? Was Clara just lying? Clara, despite all of her fawning over Sally, was perfectly happy with Jenny, they had no reason to believe otherwise. So this behaviour was highly unusual and untoward, but every other time Esther had been around Clara (which was quite a significant amount of time since Clara and Jenny were her only actual friends in Hollowmire not including Sally, who she was forced to see every day whether she wanted to or not) she had been entirely amicable. And not a psychopath trying to break into their house in the middle of the night.

" _I could pull the skull off your toy skeleton and throw that up there_ ," Clara threatened.

"Well that's just sadistic, you leave Skeletor alone."

"What!?" Sally exclaimed, "She's threatening to hurt Skeletor?"

" _I'll take him to pieces_ ," Clara continued.

"Don't you do that. Do you know how long it takes to assemble a disarticulated plastic skeleton? Like, three hours! That's too much time." There was silence down the end of the line, so much so that Esther had to check Clara hadn't hung up on her without realising. "…Clara? Are you still there?"

Another hand was shoved through the letter box, but this time no human – or vampiric – hand, but in fact the slightly-grimy, bony arm of their friendly, neighbourhood dummy skeleton, torn away from its screwed-on elbow joint and shoved through the door so that it landed on the welcome mat.

"That is so wrong!" Sally protested, "Should we call the police? Or… get Oc'thubha?"

"Okay, okay, you know what? I can shoot bolts of lightning out of my hand, so I say we let her in and see what she wants."

"Does electrocuting vampires do anything to them?"

" _Don't electrocute me_ ," said Clara into the phone, still listening, " _I couldn't take it_." Esther was again suspicious, and so she hung up and gave Sally back her phone.

"I shocked her once, by accident, and she turned into a bat."

"I don't think being a large, flying rodent with pointy teeth is going to make her less dangerous."

"Chiroptera."

"Excuse me?"

"Bats – they're not rodents, they're chiroptera, it means 'hand-wing.' They're nothing like rodents, zoologically speaking."

"How is that relevant?"

"I didn't say it was relevant, it's just that you were wrong, so-" Clara began knocking on the door again. "Honestly, this is ridiculous. It can't be that hard to ward off vampires, if it was then there would be loads of them, right? We'd all be living in fear of being attacked in our sleep?"

"Yeah, especially if we _open the doors and let them in_. Look, don't we have any stakes?"

"No?"

"Okay, here's my plan – _you_ cable-jump, yeah, to the cinema, break that box, nick the stake, bring it back here, and…"

"And what? Kill her? That's your plan?"

"No, just threaten her."

"With a deadly weapon?"

"I think it was Franklin D. Roosevelt who said, 'speak softly and carry a big stick.'"

"It was Theodore Roosevelt."

"Whatever, they're basically all the same. And I was right about what the actual quote was."

"Regardless of the fact I'm not going to do that, I don't actually know how to 'cable-jump' at will. _Plus_ -"

Clara punched her hand through the letterbox with such force that they both screamed. She had broken the metal flap from its hinge and had splintered some of the wood, and had her whole elbow in as she tried to reach for the door handle.

"Right, you're paying to get that fixed, you nutcase!" Sally shouted at her.

"Alright already! We'll open the door!" Esther said, rushing down the stairs to stop Clara from vandalising any more of their possessions. Sally followed but maintained a steady distance on the stairs, keeping Esther firmly between herself and Clara, who had finally retracted her freakishly-pale arm. Esther fumbled unlocking the door and then opened it. Clara still couldn't get in, though, they knew that from experience. "There, you can talk to her now, from out there."

"I think I should come in," Clara said, staring at Sally.

Sally began to speak, "Yeah, I'm sort of disturbed by this whole episode, so I might just go back to bed, and-"

" _No_. I have to tell you something."

"Tell me from outside."

"I'll crush the skeleton's head," said Clara, "I'll smash your windows, watch your safety deposit dwindle."

"What the heck is wrong with you!?" Esther demanded, "You're being insane. You can't just vandalise our house."

"Then let me in," Clara ordered, "Invite me." They paused, but while they did Clara made a move for the skeleton again and pushed it over from where it was propped up against the wall. It fell to the ground in the garden and part of the jaw broke off. "Come on."

"Oh my god! Stop breaking our stuff!" Sally argued, coming further down the stairs.

"I bet Doris will let me in," Clara said, "I bet she'll talk to me."

"Oh, okay, so now you're threatening to kill our next door neighbour?" Esther challenged.

"Sally was talking about staking me," Clara pointed out.

"Why do you want to come in, then? What if I've got a stake? What if I'm holding one right now, and we just said all that stuff to trick you, get you to let your guard down?" Sally challenged. Clara stared at her for a few seconds.

"I can literally see both of your hands," she said monotonously.

"Well what if I have _three_ hands?" Sally continued.

"You don't have three hands," said Esther.

"How would she know?" Sally snapped, "You're giving the game away."

"I'm giving nothing a- leave the skeleton alone!" Esther protested when Clara went to stamp on Skeletor's plastic ribs. "Gosh, fine, you can come in."

"What!? What are you doing!?" Sally exclaimed, hastening to get away as quickly as she could, but that was that. Ravenwood had been invited over the threshold.

Prior to that moment, Esther had only ever witnessed the weaknesses of vampires: she saw Clara a slave to her flasks filled with human blood; she saw Clara with the weight of her umbrella to save her from being burned up by the sun; she saw Clara with her tinted glasses and her near-blindness; she saw Clara unable to even walk past Italian restaurants because of the smell of garlic; she saw Clara take an enormous detour on her way to work to avoid a tiny stream; she saw Clara cover her ears and hide in the cellar when Christmas carollers stopped at her door. She had never realised how mellowed out Clara was in proportion to her potential, but now she did. Breaking the letterbox was one thing, but as soon as Esther invited Ravenwood in she was pushed or even _punched_ , sharply, in her stomach, and was thrown backwards into her own kitchen.

It was when she heard Sally scream in terror that everything changed.

What Esther proceeded to do felt very similar to cable-jumping, only she wasn't going through any cables. She was transmitting herself over the electrical atoms in the air itself, and she was sure in those miniscule nanoseconds that she had become living electricity, moving through the world with the speed and power of the Flash, coming upon a scene where Ravenwood had grabbed Sally Sparrow and had her fangs just millimetres away from plunging into her neck. Seeking revenge for the jab that had rendered her completely winded and cramping up, Esther tackled Ravenwood out of the air in a haze of blue and shocked her with as much lightning as she could muster, throwing her through the door at the top of the stairs back into her own bedroom, the both of them crashing to the floor.

When Esther regained herself enough to know what was going on, she saw Clara lying on the carpet, either unconscious or dead or even both at once, and she herself felt woozy and keeled over next to the Syphon 2.0, grabbing it in order to drain enough electricity to heal what she was sure were damning internal injuries from being punched in the gut by a vampire. It was almost as intense as the pain of when she had been _shot_ in the gut, when she had died, but with the advent of lightning it subsided much quicker. The entire incident served to remind her that she _was_ a walking corpse, however.

Then Sally began panicking, stepping over Clara's body on the floor and clutching a hand to her neck.

"Shit, shit, shit, shit – she bit me!"

"She didn't," said Esther, trying to sit up while still slumped against the Syphon, drawing from it.

"What just happened!? She rushed me, punched you, and then – in like, half a second, this blue flash! Was that _you_? What did you do?"

"I don't know, it… It was like cable-jumping, just, without the cables. Do you know how hard she hit me?" Esther complained, "I think I have internal injuries."

"Yeah, just – where's your mirror…" Sally was still panicking about if she was going to join them in making up the legions of undead hoards slowly swarming Hollowmire. She found Esther's mirror on her desk and lifted it to examine her neck, turning on the desk lamp at the same time. There were no marks. "Oh, thank god… she could have killed me! Why did you let her in!?"

"Because – I – I don't know! It seemed like, in the moment, I should let her in. She was going to break Skeletor."

"Why didn't you just zap her through the doorway?" Sally demanded, sitting down next to her and pulling up her knees, watching Clara closely. "She could break both of us much worse than that skeleton. She was this close to killing me." Sally held her thumb and forefinger about the same distance from each other as Ravenwood's fangs had been from her jugular. "…What do we do now? What if she wakes up? We should go get that stake."

"No! Look, let's…" when she began this sentence, Esther didn't have a clue what she was going to suggest, but halfway through she was struck by a fantastic idea, as her innards healed from their brief pummelling, "Let's call Jenny." Sally stared at her.

"Why didn't you think of that earlier!?"

"Why didn't _you_!?" Esther challenged her. She glared. "Just grab my phone and call her and explain." Sally had dropped her own phone in the scuffle on the landing, but Esther's phone was sitting on her bedside table. The only issue was that Ravenwood was lying on the floor in between them, and Esther wouldn't put it past her to play dead so that she could get the jump on them. "Go get it, I can't leave the Syphon."

"What if she attacks me again?" Sally whispered.

"I'll shoot her," Esther said, holding up her hand and letting copious amounts of electricity crackle all over her skin. Shakily, Sally got to her feet and began inching closer to Clara, who stayed completely still. Maybe she really _had_ been knocked out. Or worse…

Edging across the bedroom carpet, Sally made a lunge above Clara to snatch the phone, then scurried back to Esther as quickly as she could. Clara hadn't moved.

"Do you want me to-" Esther offered to unlock the phone, but stopped speaking when Sally unlocked it herself, inputting Esther's passcode correctly on her first try. "Uh, how do you know what my password is?"

"It's Sarah's birthday," Sally said, going through Esther's contacts to find Jenny.

"How do you know when Sarah's birthday is?"

"Because two months ago, when it was Sarah's birthday, you said 'today is Sarah's birthday, she would have been thirty-nine.' You know I do listen to you."

"Excuse me for being less impressed as you go through my phone."

"Why don't you just pick a random number? You'd think an ex-CIA analyst would know about how to keep her 'cell phone' secure."

"After this I will." Sally tapped Jenny's name – because Esther was an actual grownup who didn't put stupid nicknames for everybody in her phone, like Sally did – and held it to her ear as it rang.

"Thank god you picked up," Sally said after only a few seconds, and Esther breathed a sigh of relief. Jenny would know what to do. The Doctor always knew what to do, and Jenny was his daughter, so surely she would be able to come up with a plan. Sally put the phone on speaker when Esther kicked her.

" _What's up?_ " Jenny asked.

"Clara just showed up here and tried to kill me," said Sally.

" _…_ _Is this a joke? Are you pranking me?_ "

"Am I-!? No! This is real!"

" _You're sure? Because you need to hang up now if it's not_."

"She's telling the truth," said Esther, "You need to get here, I knocked her out, I think, but she punched me in the gut and then tried to bite Sally. She almost did. I think she's gone crazy."

" _If you two are lying, I_ will _forcibly dislocate your fingers_ ," she warned.

"You're quite violent sometimes, you know," said Sally.

"Please, we don't know what to do – we need your help," Esther begged.

"… _Okay… I need to go get some stuff – you have to drag Clara into the cellar, it's going to start getting light soon. Take her into the cellar and then draw a crucifix on a piece of paper and stick it on the back of the door, and tie her to a chair. And, Esther, I like you a lot, but if you've done even the smallest bit of irreparable damage to that girl, you'll wish you were still dead and buried in Washington_." Jenny hung up.

"To think," Sally began, "Yesterday you made fun of me for being scared of her." Esther didn't know who was more frightening, Jenny or Clara. The situation was worsened by the fact they were unable to check for a pulse or breathing from Clara, seeing as she didn't have those anyway.

"Electricity isn't one of the ways you can kill a vampire," said Esther, "According to, you know. _Dracula_. And stuff."

"No…"

"But sunlight is. So we should do what Jenny said and take her downstairs. But how are we meant to tie her up?" Esther began to get to her feet and Sally copied.

"There's rope in the cellar."

"…Why?"

"Doomsday supplies. Rope's useful. Come on, then. Let's get to it."

It was not the most fun enterprise to drag an unconscious vampire down two flights of stairs into their freezing cold basement, but it was something they had to undertake out of a mutual and newfound fear of Jenny Young. Esther was steadily remembering fragments of stories she had heard about Jenny, and how contrasting they were with the really very sweet girl who made them special cupcakes and worked in a bakery. Jenny knew how to swordfight, had a collection of guns, had allegedly murdered Captain Jack Harkness with her bare hands more than once. These fragmented recollections of her anomalous temperament really made Esther conflicted about which party in the couple of Jenny and Clara she should be most wary of.

They finally got Ravenwood bound to one of their wooden kitchen chairs in the cellar – stocked with mountains of toilet paper, canned foods, long-life milk, and about a hundred litres of water in variously-sized plastic containers; Sally's doomsday supplies, because she was basically a lunatic. Almost as much as their rabid vampire. Esther drew a rudimentary crucifix with a biro on a piece of notepad paper and sellotaped it to the back of the door, and then they left and locked it with the large, rusty key that hung around the handle on a thin piece of string, and settled in to wait for Jenny.

She did not take long to arrive. Just a minute or so after Sally had made them both much-needed cups of highly-caffeinated coffee (which Sally direly needed to counteract the sedatives she was prescribed to ingest every night) there was a knock at the door, which they had both forgotten to lock, and they answered it to Jenny, carrying a very heavy-looking silver container on one of her shoulders.

"What happened to your letterbox?" she asked.

"Clara punched it out," Sally explained. Jenny, still with the box, crouched down to get a better look at it.

"Now I believe you about there definitely being something wrong with her…" she sighed and came in, kicking the door closed behind her and setting the large box down on the table. Sally offered to make her coffee as well, an offer she accepted, and she proceeded to open the box. It was full to the brim with all manner of artifacts Esther was almost convinced Jenny had stolen from Van Helsing. It had stakes, a bible, a whole wreath of fat garlic cloves, crucifixes, long ultraviolet tube-flashlights, _more_ rope, two thermoses, and a plastic bottle of water. Jenny was also carrying a very fancy Victorian cane with her.

"What's with the stick?" Sally asked.

"Oh," said Jenny, "It's a cane-sword." She pulled the handle and revealed it to be the hilt of a very sharp and deadly blade, making Esther step away. "It's so cool, I stole it from the vampire clan who bit Clara originally, when we were in Whitby. Killed a bunch of vampires with it."

"Wait, Whitby?" Esther asked.

"Mmhmm," said Jenny, sliding the sword back into its body.

"But that's what they were talking about earlier…" Sally realised.

"Who?" Jenny inquired.

"Clara and the other vampire."

"Wait – _what_? 'Other vampire'? What other vampire?" she grew very serious.

"The bloke who ran the travelling sideshow, Dorian Reid, he's a vampire – I thought you two were having dinner together straight afterwards and she rushed home to tell you about it."

"No, she cancelled on me."

"And you didn't think that was weird?"

"Just because we're going out doesn't mean we _have_ to have dinner together every single night. She's allowed to spend time on her own when she wants. So, no, I didn't think it was weird," Jenny said, "She sounded fine on the phone. Look, what happened with this other vampire? What did he say to her?"

"He had this stake, one of his exhibits, said it was some sort of legendary vampire relic carved by Elizabeth Báthory five-hundred years ago," Sally explained. Of course, she couldn't remember to pick up milk from the store, but when it came to reciting a deranged vampire's supernatural speech, her recollection was impeccable. "You know, she's the Hungarian countess who used to torture and kill young women and bathe in the blood of virgins. They call her 'Countess Dracula' sometimes. Dorian Reid said that Báthory used the stake to kill her underlings who were disloyal or useless, and he said it was passed down until someone killed the whole 'brood' of them in the 1890s. Then he was about to say where it happened, and Clara cut him off and said 'Whitby' and he did this really creepy smile with these fangs, and she panicked and basically ran off."

"1890s? 1894?" Jenny asked.

"Yeah," said Esther, who remembered none of the other information except the name 'Whitby' and the date. She had a head for memorising dates, though – people often found it annoying and a little creepy, especially when she learnt all their birthdays.

"He was talking about me," Jenny explained, "I'm the one who killed them all. Well, I mean, Jenny Flint was there too, and she's a take-no-prisoners kind of gal. It was mainly me killing them, though, after one bit Clara. I was very angry. But I don't remember anybody saying a thing about this Elizabeth Báthory."

"…Does Clara know that you have all this vampire slaying equipment?" Sally puzzled.

"…No," Jenny admitted reluctantly, "But – I promised my father that I'd make sure she was safe. That's why she's not stuck on the TARDIS and prevented from leaving. It's only a precaution, if I told her about it she'd think I didn't trust her to be good, and I do, but this other vampire has obviously been messing with her head. She would never hurt either of you, you know that. She once stopped me from squashing a fly and made me catch it and release it. _A fly_. She collects seashells and when she was a kid she wrote poems about unicorns. She is _lightyears_ away from being in her right mind."

"I mean, I believe you," said Sally, "If she was that desperate to drink my blood she'd do it when we both get completely pissed, but she usually just talks about you and tells me intimate details I'd rather not hear. It's unpleasant."

Jenny clapped her hands and startled them both, "Right then! We're going to go talk to her, all of us. Sally, you can wear this nice garlic necklace because she won't try to bite you if you do that, Esther – I forgot that batteries for these UV lamps so you can have both of them and keep them powered. We _all_ wear a crucifix, and I've got the cane, and I'll grab a stake, and Sally takes the bible and makes sure she has it open on a page with some prayers or psalms or whatever. Oh, and this." Jenny produced one final object from her box, which Esther recognised.

"Is that a Walkman from the 1980s?"

Jenny nodded, and Sally looked at it like she was disgusted.

"Look, iPods confuse me. It's got a cassette of hymns on it."

"Loving this plan of yours to torture your significant other," Sally quipped, though she was picking up the garlic wreath and hanging that, along with a crucifix, around her neck. Esther took a crucifix and the two UV lamps as instructed, and the three of them tentatively opened the door into the cellar with Esther tentatively going first. When she flicked the light switch they saw Clara was still bound to her chair. But she had woken up.

"I could hear everything you were saying, you know," she said, casting a glare at each of them in turn, lingering mostly on Jenny. "Whatever. You're right to be worried. I could definitely kill _two_ of you, I know that much. Esther's a grey area." Jenny looked wounded. They descended the steps and Clara leant away from them, unable to look at the overwhelming amount of anti-vampire trinkets. Esther had had a theory – though she had kept it to herself – that once she had been thoroughly electrocuted, Clara might awaken from whatever spell she had been put under. Clearly, that was wrong.

"We have the upper-hand," said Jenny, standing in front of Clara in her chair, but keeping a safe distance, "You know how many vampires I've slain."

"You couldn't slay me," said Clara, "You're weak. You're a Time Lord, you have too much empathy, too much pride. This is why your species died out and why you're one of the only ones left – a _generated anomaly_. I can't believe I've been fraternising with you all this time, an inferior mistake in an even more inferior species."

"Racism is a good colour on you," Sally snapped at her.

"What do you want? Do you want some blood? Then will you go back to normal?" Jenny asked.

"You mean being docile? Neutered? Like I'm your pet who has to be spoon-fed haemoglobin? No. You see, it's the most primal instinct of all, sunshine," Clara taunted Jenny, leaning forwards in her chair, "Obviously in lesser-creatures like humans it manifests in lust and libido – except in the cases of those abnormal, broken ones, like Esther. I'm talking about procreation. But vampires don't require sex to procreate, that's just a fun hobby. A placeholder."

"You're trying to turn me into one of you?" Sally asked, "Why?"

"It's my duty. The Great Vampires are all but wiped out, but I come from a special bloodline, the Báthory bloodline."

"You weren't bitten by Elizabeth Báthory, Clara, you were bitten by some insecure man-baby who got upset that Other You played the piano better than he did. I was right there, I saw it, there are about ten witnesses – including Oswin, and she records everything she sees and has an eidetic memory," Jenny argued with her.

"But _he_ was part of the bloodline, one of the most powerful breeds of vampire in existence. Sally Sparrow should be honoured to have been chosen to join us."

"And why was I chosen?" Sally questioned, "Why me? What redeeming qualities do I possess?" But Clara, talkative as she was, did not answer that question. She instead began verbally attacking Jenny, knowing just the right thing to say to upset her deeply.

"If only you were as good as your father, you'd be able to see right inside my head. Implant memories, take them away, solve the whole mystery. But you're not as good as him, are you? Two centuries of trying and you never will be. Maybe it's time to give up."

"Where is this Dorian Reid, then?" Jenny turned away from Clara, "I'm going to kill him."

"Good luck trying. He's the most powerful of all of us," said Clara.

"Did he tell you that?" Jenny turned on her, "Did he tell you to try and turn Sally? Did…" She stopped talking, Sally and Esther still watching from afar. Esther didn't want Clara to insult her any more than she already had done, so maintained a low profile. Without warning, Jenny grabbed Clara's head and bent it sideways, and for a second Esther thought she was trying to break her neck. Clara looked relatively nonplussed though. "There's a bite mark on your shoulder!"

"Wait, you mean like, a fresh one?" Sally interjected.

"She must have gone back to the cinema in the middle of the night, talked to him, got into this mess," Esther suggested.

"Did he bite you!?" Jenny demanded of Clara, but Clara didn't answer. "I'm going to go kill him, and if that doesn't sort you out I'm going to shut you in a room of the TARDIS and slide blood under the door for however long it takes to stop you from being basically evil. Because I love you."

"Pathetic," Clara scoffed.

"Yep. Obviously. Now – you two are going to take me to this cinema, alright?"

"What? Both of us? Shouldn't one of us guard her?" Sally asked, "I mean, not me."

"Wherever we are there's going to be a predatory vampire after us; I am not going to fight one without the Lightning Girl for backup, and I don't trust Clara to leave you here with her," Jenny said. Neither of them argued with her as Jenny took the garlic wreath from around Sally's neck, to her objections, and then dropped it over Clara's head, though Clara shouted and struggled against her.

"Don't do that! It'll burn me! No! NO! Jenny – Jen, I'm sorry, I love you, you're an angel, you're – NO! Get it off me, you _abomination_!" she protested, but Jenny did not. "I'll die. It'll kill me. You're _killing me_ – Sally, please, Esther, you can't stand by, she's killing me. She was an assassin, she's killed dozens of people, remorseless, she's evil, you can't trust her, you can trust me." But they didn't trust her, Jenny led the way back out of their own cellar, up the rickety wooden stairs. As soon as she saw they were leaving, Clara began to hurl abuse again. Jenny took care to wrap one of the crucifix necklaces tightly around the door-handle.

"Is she definitely not going to get out…?" Sally asked, casting a wary glance at the cellar door, still able to hear Clara yelling insults from beneath.

"The garlic will keep her weak enough until the sun comes up, then she'll probably pass out again," Jenny explained, "Now come on. We're going to kill Dorian Reid and hopefully break whatever curse he's put on the love of my life."

"Were you really an assassin?" Esther now questioned.

"…Yes," she admitted, "But it's complicated. I don't like talking about it. Let's just say I'm… not remorseless. I'm not remotely remorseless. Guilt is my driving emotion at any given point. Now you two hurry up and get dressed – you can't go fight vampires in your knickers, _Sally_."

"I was – these are my pyjamas! I'm not even – ugh! First she's abusing me, now you, I can't catch a break…" Sally complained as she trudged out of the kitchen; Esther remained for a moment.

"…Hey, are you okay?" she asked Jenny.

"No," was all she said, distracted, thinking. "Do you think I could build a gun that shoots stakes? Or a slingshot? Or a miniature cannon?"

"Has anybody ever told you you're kind of scary sometimes?"

"Mmm," Jenny nodded, and after she said nothing more Esther finally took her leave to go and get dressed herself.

* * *

The Aurora Picture House looked even creepier in the day. Derelict buildings belonged in the night and the dark, where their ugliness couldn't be seen by the naked eye, but with the cold sunlight high above everything unpleasant about the place was illuminated. It had a ghastly façade, rotten art-deco with a smashed ticket booth and one of the doors hanging from its hinges, chewed to pieces by rats and other vermin. Unbeknownst to Jenny, Esther and Sally had slyly hatched a plan to dawdle in the house long enough for the sun to come up, despite Jenny's arguments that it was 'cowardly' to hunt a vampire during the day when it would be, at best, sleeping, or at worse, weakened. She said cowardly, they said _safe_ , though Esther highly doubted that the cinema had won any awards recently for its structural integrity. If such an award existed, and the awarding body visited Hollowmire to assess it. Assessing the structural integrity of buildings had been one of her dream jobs when she was a kid.

"Kind of ironic, when you think about it. A vampire in a cinema. Since their image can't be captured," Sally commented as Jenny, utterly fearless, vaulted over the broken turnstile rather than pushing it like Sally and Esther did.

"Hey, don't go far," Esther hissed at her as they followed behind her. She was the one with all the stakes, after all. "I know your dad has a bad habit of wandering away from his companions…"

"We're not her companions," Sally argued.

"Get over yourself, we're totally her companions."

"Don't think you want to be, nothing particularly good usually happens to anyone who calls themselves my 'companion'," Jenny said, pausing, looking off into the middle-distance like a character on a television show experiencing a poignant flashback. "Guess I am a lot like my father in that respect…" she said this quietly enough that it was obviously not directed at them, or anybody in particular, and then she turned looking somewhat haunted and entered the theatre.

The exhibits were gone. Had Reid left, was Esther's first question? The picture house was gutted, it looked even worse now that shafts of sunlight were piercing the musty, wet carpets, stained from the decades' worth of rain, lighting it up. The ghost light remained on the stage where Sally had left it last night, but she hadn't brought her camera with her that day to take a picture.

"I thought you said there were exhibits in here? Glass cases?" Jenny asked, peering around.

"There were," said Esther, watching Sally closely because Sally – just like Jenny and Jenny's father – also liked to wander off. Maybe it was a British thing, not caring about safety. Then again, despite their accents, neither Jenny nor the Doctor were British; it was sometimes easy to forget they were both from outer space. "What if he's gone? What will you do then?"

"Put Clara on the TARDIS where she can't hurt anybody and track him down. Who wants to be hunted by a genetically engineered, alien super-soldier? Besides, he can't have gone far, it's daylight, he'll have had to hunker down. Probably wants to see what kind of chaos Clara will wreak. Filling her head with lies…"

"Lies?" Esther asked.

"My father has one of the largest libraries in the universe, a complete collection of every text he can find. You don't think I'd research vampires after my own girlfriend became one? Vampires don't work like that and they don't work through 'pure bloodlines', it's propaganda. This guy is some kind of… vampire Nazi," said Jenny, "And he can't be important. The most powerful vampire in existence isn't even a vampire – Rassilon, one of the most dangerous Time Lords, allegedly got himself bitten by a Great Vampire, on purpose. There was an entire cult dedicated to it on Gallifrey, dad's told me about it. He doesn't believe there's any truth to the story, though. I'm sure it doesn't fit in Reid's 'vision' for his 'new world order.' Does this building have a cellar?"

"A sub-basement, yeah," Sally answered, "They used it to store film reels."

"Really?" Jenny asked, "…How old are these film reels?" She headed towards a door which was almost invisible under the shadow of the grand circle.

"The cinema shut down in the 50s, so about that old, I suppose," Sally said.

"Interesting…" mused Jenny, trying to open the door. It appeared to be locked.

"Maybe there's another way-" Esther started to suggest, but Jenny was a woman on a mission. When the door wouldn't open, she didn't even try her sonic screwdriver. She just kicked it, she kicked it so hard it splintered from its hinges and crashed into the room it was protecting and all the way down a flight of stairs.

Jenny glanced at Esther, "Sorry, were you saying something?"

"Absolutely nothing important…"

"Cool…" Jenny took out a pair of glasses and put them on, round-framed reading glasses that made her look unusually bookish. She caught them both staring at her. "What? …They're night vision. I use them to read when Clara's asleep. It's dark in there."

"Sure…" said Sally, unconvinced. She reached into her own pocket and pulled out her trademark flashlight she basically carried everywhere with her, 'just in case', while Esther removed one of her gloves and created her own light by producing lightning to dance across her skin. The ghost light flickered very faintly when she walked past it on Jenny's trail.

They didn't get far until they began to cough, however.

"What's that smell?" Sally asked, covering the lower half of her face with her hand, "It smells disgusting."

"Don't you remember what Clara said?" Esther whispered, "She said there was a weird smell. She said it smelled like death."

"Sometimes," Jenny began, "When I lived in Berlin, we had to smuggle bodies. When the Soviets built the wall so many people were cut off from their families, their friends – and they couldn't get the right passports or forms to cross the border and escape the police state. Then they died, and sometimes, if the conditions allowed for it, _we_ would take their bodies back. But that's the thing about smuggling, you have to wait for everything to be perfect, the wind to be in the right direction, and you really need to get a corpse in the ground in two or three days ideally or decomposition kicks in in a _big_ way. And decomposition is a nasty affair, isn't that right, Esther?"

"…Yep…"

"What's your point?" Sally asked.

"My point is that it smells like corpses down here. Rotten corpses. Carrion, carcasses, viscera."

"You really do get into more gory situations than ordinary people on the TARDIS," Esther commented.

"Should have seen me when I had my eyes gouged out."

"I have a bit of a weak stomach, is this a bad time to mention?"

"You'd better strengthen up your stomach _sharpish_ ," Jenny warned, "Be careful at the bottom of these stairs. They're slippery."

"Slippery? What's…" Sally made the grave mistake of shining her torch down to see where they were walking, illuminating some vivid streaks of red. "Oh, god…" The stairs were covered in blood.

"Hey, Sally… maybe you should go back upstairs. Maybe you should both go back upstairs," said Jenny. She could see much better than them with her glasses, and had obviously spotted something nasty that the other two were oblivious to.

"Give me this," Esther said, grabbing the flashlight from Sally and forcing electricity into it to strengthen the light intensity at least three times, which was when they saw the horror. It was like a Hammer prop studio, a special room where they kept the dead bodies, an array of dead bodies, four or five of them, hung upside down by their feet with their throats cut. The floor was covered in blood, some of it still not dry. "Try not to look…" Sally was horrified. For the first time in her life she couldn't think of anything clever to say.

While trying to avoid staring at the corpses, Esther noticed the shelves down there, all stacked with ancient film reels that had just been abandoned at the same time as the building. Why had Jenny been asking about film? Whatever she wanted with it, they had found a stockpile. And _then_ she noticed something more interesting, which indicated that Dorian Reid must still be nearby: his exhibits. The glass cases, covered with fabric, on a different side of the sub-basement. She pointed them out to Sally.

"Jenny – the exhibits are here," Esther said, catching Jenny's attention. Jenny didn't have a flare for the dramatic at all in that moment, and as soon as the covered glass cases were pointed out to her she marched over and dragged the cloths away one by one – though the severed head of Grigori Rasputin made her jump, too. It really _was_ a hideous artifact.

"What's _that_?" Jenny indicated the bell jar with the blue vapour inside it.

"A ghost," Esther answered, "He said it was Marilyn Monroe's ghost, but I don't know about that. It's definitely _someone's_ ghost, though. I can feel it. I don't know what he's done to trap it like that, it's cruel, quite frankly."

"Yeah…" said Jenny. Then she saw the case with the stake inside it, and after a moment to think lifted her ornate cane and swung it for the glass, which shattered beneath the blow. Sally and Esther both braced themselves for Reid to emerge from the gloom like the monster he was as Jenny picked up the ancient stake from where it had been set on a pedestal, but it didn't happen. Thank god. Jenny cast a wary eye over Rasputin's head, but then gave the ghostly bell jar the same treatment. She smashed the case surrounding it. "Shouldn't leave them here, whether they're Marilyn Monroe or not."

Sally didn't say a word, but it was she who walked over to pick the jar up, being the only one with both free hands now that Esther had taken the flashlight, watching the ghost curl around like smoke within the confines of its transparent prison. Maybe Reid would be less likely to attack her if she was carrying one of his exhibits around.

"How long have those flyers been going up?" Jenny asked.

"I don't know," said Esther, "We only noticed the first one yesterday."

"I can't work out if these people are all from Hollowmire or not…" she sighed, "Might have to call Undercoll. See if Dr Cohen can determine it. I'm sure she'd love to autopsy some vampire victims." Sally was so traumatised by the bodies she didn't even flinch when Jenny mentioned Undercoll, which was her usual reaction to anybody bringing up the organisation James Elliott worked for.

They kept moving, edging around the bodies and trying not to slip on the blood, Esther averting her eyes because she didn't want it to turn out that she _did_ recognise any of them. She couldn't bear the thought of this happening to someone she _knew_ , even more than the thought of it just happening to anybody. 'Detachment' had been drilled into any and everyone who worked for the CIA, and it was a tricky behaviour to unlearn.

"This is why the Time Lords wanted to wipe them out…" Jenny muttered to herself. She must be _very_ worried about Clara if she was justifying attempted genocide – unless Esther really didn't know her all that well at all. Maybe Jenny was always talking about genocide. "Ah- _ha_ ," she breathed, spotting something. Esther turned the flashlight in that direction and illuminated none other than a coffin. Of course, Dorian Reid and his showmanship _had_ to sleep in a coffin, _had_ to make it seem like he had just stepped from a black-and-white horror movie. It was rather an ornate coffin, too – nicer than Esther's coffin had been, to her mild annoyance.

"Seriously?" Sally hissed, "A _coffin_?"

"Clara keeps talking about wanting a coffin," Jenny whispered, creeping towards it. Apart from when she was speaking, she moved completely silently. A master thief, of course. "Something about it being peaceful. Personally, I think it's very weird and I hope she doesn't actually get one. Or worse, go drag her own coffin out of the ground in London." That _would_ be very bleak. And to think, Clara was always complaining when people jokingly called her basement-bedroom a crypt. It would literally be a crypt if she stuck a coffin down there. "Esther, stay right behind me, you're my backup. Anything happens, you zap him, I whack him, got it?"

"Yep. Zap 'em and whack 'em…"

Esther didn't pretend that her heart wasn't racing when Jenny went to lift the lid on Reid's coffin. She handed the cane to Sally when she did this, who held it very awkwardly along with the large, glowing jar, and then tightened her grip on the ancient stake. The coffin was well-maintained, the hinges didn't even creak as Jenny lifted it, and Reid's pasty, sick complexion was revealed to them again. He was asleep, most certainly. Jenny raised the stake above his chest, all ready to plunge, but then she just… didn't.

"What are you doing?" Esther hissed.

"It's cowardly," Jenny whispered.

"It's _safe_ ," Sally argued, "Look at all the people he's killed, we have to stop him." Jenny stared at Reid, then she reached to lift her crucifix necklace over her head. "What are you _doing_? Just end it!"

"You have to have a code," she said simply, holding the crucifix right over Reid's head. She was obviously trying to wake him, and it was Esther's job, no matter how much she agreed with Sally, to back her up. She conjured as much lightning as she could in her right hand, holding that along with the flashlight, ready to shoot Reid if he tried anything funny. And yet, despite Esther's incredible reflexes earlier, it was Jenny who lived up to her reputation.

The crucifix had the desired effect. Reid's black eyes shot open and in the blink of an eye he sat bolt upright and went for Jenny – but she was ready. As soon as he awoke, she plunged the stake, and there was a grotesque crunching sound as it tore through his bones and his organs and black liquid sprang up through his clothes like thick, gluttonous blood. Reid looked down and saw the stake, at which point Jenny twisted it and shoved it deeper.

"I'm the Time Lord who killed that entire vampire brood in Whitby," she said, "And now I'm killing you, because of what you did to Clara. She's not going to bite Sally. She's not going to bite anyone. And even if she did, they wouldn't become monsters, like you."

"She always did seem weak," he said hoarsely, stiff and hardly able to move, "If she couldn't even bite this insolent human spawn." He meant Sally. "I hope you enjoy eternity with your appalling lover, Time Lord." He froze all over and turned a dark shade of grey, then his skin began to crack and fall apart until eventually he turned to dust – just like in the movies – and was a stack of powder in his coffin. Jenny threw the stake in there with him and slammed the lid closed.

"What do we do now?" Esther asked when Jenny took her cane back from Sally.

"Burn this place. I'm going to search, you two empty the film from those reels and throw it all over. It's cellulose nitrate film, it's going to burn this whole building to the ground."

"That's arson," Esther argued, that's illegal."

"I'm in charge," Jenny said firmly, "I'm two-hundred years old, I know how to cover up murders. I'm going to look for any identification of those victims and then we're going to leave and burn everything except that poor ghost. If you don't like it, I'll manage on my own."

* * *

"How's Elliott?" Esther asked as Sally re-entered the living room, after retreating to the attic for a little under two hours. She had left to call James just after Jenny had brought lunch for them all. Sally did not eat much and had then vanished. She did not cope well with dead bodies. Neither had Esther, once upon a time, but after becoming one, after seeing herself in a darkened shop window during the lightning storm that night four years ago, she didn't quite have the same distaste.

True to her word, Jenny had set fire to the Picture House, burning the cellulose film after convincing Esther to ignite it with a stray spark. They had fled and called the emergency services as soon as it had been long enough for the bodies to have been burned to a crisp. But Reid had many more possessions than just his sideshow exhibits. Many books, old tomes, notebooks, diaries, and a collection of driver's licenses and lists of names of his past victims, which Jenny now had covering their living room floor. Clara was still unconscious in the cellar, but they had removed the garlic wreath and were now waiting on her waking up. Jenny was poring over the evidence, as well as Esther, but Sally couldn't quite stomach it, reading names of dead people like that. Jenny had a plan to notify the families and try to give them some closure about what had happened to their loved ones. Reid was meticulous and kept records of everything, and had apparently been using his sideshow as a way to pursue his other passion (apart from murder), attempting to chronicle vampire history.

"He's okay," Sally said, sitting down in the corner of her sofa. Jenny was cross-legged on the rug, in front of the television, examining papers and photos and documents.

"Is he your boyfriend or not?" Jenny asked.

"It's complicated," was all Sally said. It was all she ever said, and Esther had long-ago given up trying to pry information out of her about her love life. She didn't particularly care. She didn't think Jenny cared, either – at least, she didn't pursue it. Sally pulled a blanket over herself and curled up. The room was nice and toasty since Esther had lit the fireplace. "What have you found out?"

"He had a whole book about me," Jenny said, picking up a leather-bound notebook. Esther highly suspected the leather was human leather, but she didn't want to think about it. Jenny flicked through the pages as she continued to talk to Sally, "About this incident. They – or he, at least – calls it the Abbey Massacre. He's got tons of bizarre witness sightings – and look at this." She showed Sally a specific page, one with a watercolour drawing of a blue box on it. The TARDIS. She flipped to another page, "And this one." It was a sketch of a young woman, one Sally had never met but whom Esther recognised immediately.

"Who's that? Is that you?" Sally frowned.

"Me? No, that's my mum," said Jenny, "It's actually quite a good likeness, to say it's an artist's impression. I'll have to show it to Other Clara." It had notes around the edge about this woman, the mysterious American. It was an entire, second-hand chronicle of what had transpired that day in Whitby when Ravenwood had been bitten – Reid had been trying to discover the identity of the scourge of the vampires for decades. In a roundabout way, he had succeeded. "Do you think I look like my mother?"

"Maybe? A little?" Sally said unsurely, "I don't know. I've never met her."

"He's sadistic," Esther said eventually, reading through a big book of what she thought must be laboratory records. She was eating an apple at the same time. Experiments, studies into other vampires and their capabilities. "He converts people and then runs tests on them and kills them."

"What kinds of tests?" Jenny asked.

"There's a really long one about how long different vampires can last in different degrees of sunlight until they burn up, it's really twisted," she said, taking another big bite from her apple but then she saw something of genuine interest. She put the apple in her mouth, biting it, and lifted the heavy book closer to her eyes with both hands. Sally and Jenny had paused and were watching her, waiting to see what she would do next. She handed the book to Sally and pointed out a specific paragraph, and Sally began to read aloud while Esther bit from her apple again.

"It says, 'The effects of vampire venom on vampires'…" she skimmed for a few seconds, "He was convincing his own fledglings to bite each other or bite them himself… he rules that it allows the infecting vampire to have a certain degree of influence over the bitten one, but the influence ends when the infecting one dies. He'd kill them off himself when he got bored. God, they were like lab rats, his own kind – this is totally sick." She gave the book back to Esther, shaking her head at it.

"But that's good," said Esther, "Because it means Clara will be okay when she wakes up, he won't be exerting any influence over her anymore." Jenny smiled and looked down at the book with notes about Whitby in it again, but she was quite obviously thinking about Clara. Sally didn't say anything again for some moments but turned her attention to Jenny.

"Are you going to show her this stuff?" she asked.

"Who?"

"Clara."

"Why not? It's useful. You could compile a vampire encyclopaedia. She's not going to read about it and suddenly become evil," said Jenny, "She might not even be interested. _I'm_ not that interested in Time Lord history. Esther's not interested in why Liam Kent became so insane, or how the Zuarion technology that brought her back to life worked. If Clara doesn't want it then I'm sure dad will." Esther was, truthfully, a little interested in how the Zuarion technology worked. But she, like Jenny, didn't think that hearing of Reid's cruel and unusual experiments was going to make Clara want to kill reams of humans. After all, she had a steady supply of blood; she had no reason to turn psychotic. "I bet _you_ want it, don't you? You want all the information about vampires."

"I can't say I'm not interested," said Sally.

"Well, these aren't one of your conspiracy theories," Jenny told her seriously, "They're real, and dangerous. She almost bit you today – she would have done, if Esther wasn't there."

"If Esther wasn't there nobody would have opened the door," Sally grumbled.

"Hey, I'm sorry about that," Esther apologised again, "She was going to break the door down if I didn't."

"And she could have killed me. I don't want to be one of the undead, I'm sorry."

"You're not getting these documents," Jenny said, "You can look at them while they're here, but then it's Clara's decision what happens to them, being as she's the only vampire."

"I feel like they're not a species. They're a condition. It's no wonder your lot keep trying to wipe them out," Sally said, and then, barely ten minutes after returning from her room, she got up and left again. They watched her go, heard her trudge upstairs to be on her own.

"Will she be alright?" Jenny asked Esther.

"She's had a rough day."

"Yeah… when Clara wakes up, I'll get her out of here quickly. Do you think Sally will forgive her?"

"I don't know, I mean, I don't know anybody that's made her so upset before," Esther said, thinking, "She gets worked up about James, but… I think she will. Once she's slept, had a few days. I mean… I know it wasn't her, but she said some pretty horrible things. She said I was broken."

"Esther, you know Clara, my Clara. She was one of the people who came and rescued you from UNIT, remember? She came crawling through vents to get you – she'd never even _met_ you. And then Other Clara was the person whose idea it was to take you to McDonald's and get milkshakes, and she put you up in her room, made you coffee. She is an angel and she'll be mortified by what she's done, you know that."

"Yeah. Yeah, no, totally. Sally just doesn't like dead bodies. They really wig her out. If she doesn't come around in a couple of days then I'll talk to her and see what's going on, okay?"

Jenny nodded slowly, "Make sure she's alright. And if there's anything I can do, seriously, anything. I'll fly to London and bring James Elliott up here myself if she wants me to.

"I'll let you know." Jenny went back to flicking through the notebook again, looking for more information about herself. It didn't last for long. The afternoon was creeping up on them and with it Clara Ravenwood's usual time for awakening. Almost as soon as half past one came and went, Jenny dropped everything and paused. "Do you hear that?" she asked Esther. Esther strained her ears to listen and, yes, she did: shouting, from their cellar. Clara, begging for someone to come and tell her what was going on.

Jenny _ran_ to get to the cellar, but Esther proceeded slowly, carefully, preparing for the worst-case scenario that Reid's death wouldn't alleviate Clara's 'affliction.' She turned on the lonely lightbulb that hung in the middle of their basement and went through the door Jenny had left hanging open.

"Are you okay, are you okay?" touching Clara's face all over, brushing her hair back, leaning down. Esther paused on the stairs and watched from a distance, but from where she was it looked like Clara was crying. Jenny shushed her gently. "I'm sorry about tying you up in the chair, we had to…" Clara's sobbing convinced Esther that Reid's influence had ended, and with that she took her leave, also vanishing off upstairs, like Sally, to sit in her own room and wait for their most recent ordeal to be over.

 **AN: Marilyn Monroe's Ghost in a Jar will return at a later date.**


End file.
